Interesting Lottery Deal

So, the Massachusetts State Lottery tried an interesting new product over the last couple months, which was more of a raffle format than the format the lottery usually uses. Tickets cost $20 and were available over the past couple months, and the winning ticket numbers will be chosen tomorrow. There’s a $20 million prize, as well as ten $1 million prizes and forty (40) $250,000 prizes. They were planning on selling 4 million tickets. However, they’ve only sold 32% of that amount so far, and are still planning on giving out the same prize distribution.

I think that means that the expected value of a ticket purchase is actually positive, or pretty close. It’s almost tempting me to buy one. I may run some numbers later this evening.