Lottery Simulator

Interactively explore lottery probabilities and simulate thousands of tickets in seconds

Shri Khalpada

Shri Khalpada

Every so often, a lottery jackpot will get so high that I'll hear about it on the news or from a friend. After daydreaming what I would do with a 9-figure payday, I usually wonder about the odds of winning the jackpot. How many tickets would I need to buy to have a reasonable chance of winning?

While major lotteries publish some of the numbers, I wanted to build something more interactive to demonstrate the odds. With that, here is the PerThirtySix Lottery Simulator!

This tool is broken up into two sections: Setup and Simulation. The Setup section lets explore probabilities for an existing American lottery or for your own lottery with custom rules. The Simulation section lets you pick some numbers and play up to thousands of tickets per second, and visualizes the returns for you. Note that this tool makes some simplifying assumptions, like that there's only one jackpot winner and that taxes are ignored.

1) Setup
You can set up the rules for an existing lottery system or for your own lottery with custom rules.
Lottery:
Rules
Select  5  numbers from  1  to  70 
and one bonus number from 1 to  25 
Ticket
Ticket Cost:  $2 
Breakeven Probability:  4.2% 
✔️✔️✔️✔️✔️ | ✔️ $330,000,000 * 1 in 302.6M odds (0.0%)
✔️✔️✔️✔️✔️ | ❌ $1,000,000 1 in 12.6M odds (0.0%)
✔️✔️✔️✔️❌ | ✔️ $10,000 1 in 931.0K odds (0.0%)
✔️✔️✔️✔️❌ | ❌ $500 1 in 38.8K odds (0.0%)
✔️✔️✔️❌❌ | ✔️ $200 1 in 14.5K odds (0.0%)
✔️✔️✔️❌❌ | ❌ $10 1 in 606.1 odds (0.2%)
✔️✔️❌❌❌ | ✔️ $10 1 in 692.7 odds (0.1%)
✔️✔️❌❌❌ | ❌ $0 1 in 28.9 odds (3.5%)
✔️❌❌❌❌ | ✔️ $4 1 in 89.4 odds (1.1%)
✔️❌❌❌❌ | ❌ $0 1 in 3.7 odds (26.9%)
❌❌❌❌❌ | ✔️ $2 1 in 36.6 odds (2.7%)
❌❌❌❌❌ | ❌ $0 1 in 1.5 odds (65.5%)
* Jackpot value roughly estimated based on recent historical data. You can use the "Custom" option to set your own payout values.
2) Simulation
Once you're done setting up the rules above and picking your numbers, hit Start below!

We're just getting started.

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