Why big lotto jackpots make people spend more

The jackpot climbs past $50 million, and suddenly it's everywhere. It's on the news. It's in every newsagent's window.

People who never play buy a ticket. Regular players grab a few extra games. Someone at work starts a syndicate.

This is jackpot fever, and lottery operators count on it.

Your odds don't budge

Your chance of winning division 1 with one game is set by the game's rules. It's the same whether the jackpot is $3 million or $150 million.

In Powerball, that's about 1 in 134 million a game. In Saturday Lotto, about 1 in 8 million. A bigger jackpot means a bigger prize if you win. It doesn't make you any more likely to win. See the odds for every game and division.

What a huge number does to your head

Big numbers all start to feel the same. Most of us can't really tell 1 in a million from 1 in 100 million. Both just feel like "a long shot, but somebody wins". So the odds fade into the background and the prize takes over.

Then the daydreaming starts. The house. Quitting work. Looking after the family. The more clearly you can picture winning, the more likely it feels.

Nobody wants to be the one person in the office who didn't chip in the week the syndicate won. That fear sells a lot of tickets.

And there's always "someone has to win". True, eventually. But that someone is almost never you, because there are so many someones.

Big jackpots get shared

When the jackpot is huge, far more people play. That makes it much more likely to be won, and much more likely to be split between several winners.

Our figures from past draws show how many more games get played as jackpots grow, and how often division 1 winners have had to share. See jackpot fever in the numbers, and how much division 1 winners really got.

What your ticket is really worth

Lotteries pay back much less than they take. Out of every dollar spent on tickets, around 60c comes back as prizes. The rest goes to the operator, the shops that sell the tickets and the government. See where each dollar goes.

Keeping your cool when the jackpot's huge

Work out what you'd normally spend on lotteries in a week. Then stick to it, however big the jackpot gets.

In a syndicate? Agree on the amount before anyone buys a thing. Our syndicate splitter works out everyone's fair share.

Before you buy, check what one game is worth at this week's jackpot. Then think about what that money could do over a year instead. The spend check shows you what it could grow to, for free.