Re: Lotteries
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Point 1: You don't know how likely it is you are going to end up splitting the prize with someone who has the same numbers as you do.
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You can make it less likely by avoiding popular numbers (such as birthdays) and geometric patterns.
If you assume that all tickets are random, you can compute your fair share of the jackpot, which is the probability that someone wins (roughly 1-e^-(# tickets/# combinations)) times the jackpot divided by the number of combinations. For example, if 10 million tickets are sold with 10 million combinations, and a $15 million jackpot, your expected share of the nominal jackpot is about (1-1/e) * $1.50 ~ $0.95 per ticket.
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