The next Mega Millions lottery drawing is scheduled for Tuesday, January 3rd, 2023, with an estimated jackpot of $785 million dollars. Tickets are available in forty-five US states, the District of Columbia, and the US Virgin Islands. I won’t attempt to cover the ethics, the economics, or the statistical odds involved in playing the lottery.
When the jackpot gets this high, offices and other groups begin to do informal lottery pools. Perhaps some of us prefer to increase our odds of winning – albeit slightly – without spending more than the cost of a ticket or two. Having been a part of these lottery pools in more than one location over the years, I’d like to discuss how I prefer a lottery pool be run, both when buying in, and when running a pool.
Don’t Rely on Trust Where You Don’t Have To
I’ve seen and participated in lottery pools where a trusted member of the group bought the tickets every week and reported back to the group whether any prizes were won. (Keep in mind that lotteries pay out many smaller prizes in addition to the jackpot.) No other participants ever saw the tickets nor knew what numbers were played. I’ve never enjoyed the blind trust method.
Blind pools carry risks for participants as well as the person managing the pool. For participants, you never truly know whether you’re sharing any prizes equitably or not. For that matter, you never truly know whether tickets are being bought or if the money is going somewhere else.
For the person running the pool and buying the tickets, blind pools carry even more risk. I’m sure it’s very common that the person running a blind pool buys extra tickets for themselves using their own funds, which is completely acceptable. Or a member of their household buys tickets, or even an extended family member does. What if one of those personal tickets wins big? Will every member of the pool believe that the winning ticket was purchased on the side and not part of the pool to which they have a claim? I doubt it. Running a blind pool while anyone in your family circle also buys tickets sounds like a good way to get tied up in court for years over any substantial prize.
So if blind pools are a bad idea all around, what should be done? All tickets purchased for a pool should be scanned and sent out as PDFs or similar to every participant prior to the drawing. Every pool participant should know in advance of the drawing precisely what tickets and numbers are part of the pool that they have a claim to. No exceptions. If you read no further, this item is the most critical.
Don’t Use Your Employer’s Resources
Our personal and work lives blend together more than ever these days. It’s easy to start thinking of the computer sitting in front of me at the office as mine. But it’s clearly not. It was paid for by shareholders of the company after going through the company’s internal procurement process and approvals, and it exists to further the interests and work of the company. So, in order to avoid any workplace issues, disciplinary actions, or potential legal entanglements, I recommend conducting office lottery pools using non-company resources only. Scan the tickets at home. (A scanner is cheap.) E-mail the scans to the personal e-mail addresses of the participants. I prefer creating a special Google Form (example) for participants of each contest to enter their personal contact information. I don’t reuse the form but create a new one for each contest.
Rules for Participants
Ideally, one should come up with rules or shared understanding for participation. Of particular importance is what to do with any small prizes. A small prize might net less than $1 per participant. Does that get paid out in coins or used to buy tickets in the next drawing? Do those tickets get merged into a new, large pool, potentially with different participants, or do they stand on their own? In the past I’ve tried to roll small prizes forward over a series of several drawings, with the varied participants of the prior pools having a smaller and smaller stake in each new pool. In the event that small prizes are won three or four times in a row, the math becomes very cumbersome to sort out. From a practical standpoint, I’ve since arrived at the following conclusion. Prizes greater than $1 per participant should probably paid back. Prizes that are less than $1 per participant should be used to buy tickets for the next contest, but should stand on their own and not be merged with any other pool. Only the original participants should have a claim against any prizes generated by subsequent tickets purchased with their winnings.
Set Expectations About How to Handle a Jackpot
If your office pool wins big, every participant is going to know it and have a scanned copy of the tickets. Ideally you’d want to hire a lawyer to accept any headline-grabbing jackpot on the group’s behalf and use any tricks available to keep the individual participants’ names out of the news. This is going to be quickly negated by someone posting on Facebook, “Hey, my coworkers at XYZ Company and I just won the lottery!”, complete with a screenshot of the tickets for illustration. In any group of people, there are some that would perhaps welcome the publicity while others want to live as quiet a life as possible. As a participant, you can’t know what’s going on in every other member’s life, nor the lives of their family, extended family, and acquaintances. Shining a spotlight on participants as ‘rich’ could constitute an act of harm against some. Best to set expectations up front.
Have Fun
The easiest way to make something no longer fun is to begin adding a bunch of rules. No one enjoys rules. The rules I’ve suggested above are with the intent of keeping the game fun, minimizing conflicts, and assuring a favorable outcome in the extremely unlikely event that you and your colleagues win big and can retire early. Now that’d be fun.
If you have any suggestions for running a lottery pool among colleagues, please post them below.
