Lottery tickets
The occasional scratch-off ticket can be fun to buy and might well net you a $2 or $3 win, but when it comes to the multimillion dollar Powerball drawings, it’s safe to assume your number will never come up, and the money you don’t spend on the ticket is the real win.
Expert analysis varies, but one mathematician calculated a one in 292,201,338 chance of an individual hitting a major jackpot.
