There are existing lottery syndicates that attempt to buy all the numbers in PowerBall and whenever the lottery reaches a high enough number. Investors pool money to buy enough tickets to have a good shot at making money.
The main issues are:
1) splitting the pot. There are several syndicates working at the moment, I think at least six, and if two or three of them attempt to hit the same jackpot, a split pot will give them a huge loss.
2) entering all the numbers. The lottery will not accept pre-printed or computer-printed pick cards. All those bubbles have to be filled in by hand. The syndicates employ teams of day-laborers to fill out the cards, but they have to ensure accuracy. Then the tickets have to be purchased and scanned, which leads to:
2A) breaking up the teams into enough trustworthy groups to buy 10,000 tickets at a time, and occupying several storefront retailers all day scanning in tickets. Not all retailers will put up with this, since they're not making any real money off it. It is actually difficult to process all the tickets you need to buy before the next drawing. And you have to go to a retailer that is open to the public--even if he's in on the syndicate, they have to be a real retail location. Can't just open your own 7-11 and close the doors for one day while your machines hum along. The lottery will demand to see the security video of the purchase.
2B) Not all retailers know buying so many tickets is technically allowed, plus, the Lottery commissions do warn retailers to notify them if someone attempts to buy all the numbers. You're going to get attention and maybe shut out by someone who doesn't want to cooperate.
They don't actually buy every single combination for every single drawing. I believe they buy all the 5+1 combos with no duplicates, since hitting 5 plus the powerball on multiple tickets will still get them a profit even if none of them, by chance, happen to hit 6+1. If one does then that's even better, of course.
They will buy all the combos for some lesser drawings. Powerball and the big lotteries just have too many possible outcomes. They'll also hit the "roll up" jackpots whenever those occur (a roll-up is when the lottery has a deadline to pay out the jackpot... on the last drawing in the period if no one has 6+1, then they'll split the big prize with all 5+1 winners and start the jackpot over from the minimum next time).
The main differences between this and the DFS situation is 1) it's not explicitly against the rules, because, 2) the suckers still show up to play the lotto even though there are syndicates. The game is big enough that the lottery will still get the guy with a dollar and a dream taking his stab at the PowerBall. The ratio of syndicate-to-sucker money in lottery is a lot different than it is in DFS, and if DFS didn't at least put on the show of limiting collusion, would be even worse for them. DFS has to present the illusion that some guy can walk in off the street with his nine favorite football players and win big. But no one would believe it without the collusion rules.
right. But not every combination is valid, since there's a salary cap. We're probably talking about 300 entries buying up a small percentage of all possible entries, not a guarantee, but, enough to make coordination profitably feasible.
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