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The number of winners in a lottery has an approximate Poisson distribution, and the expected number of winners is the number of tickets sold divided by the number of ways to win (approximately 146.1 million for the Powerball Lottery). As the size of the jackpot increases, so does the expected number of winners. As the expected number of winners increases, your expected winnings decrease because you have to split the jackpot with other winners.

Even for very large jackpots, the expected value of a ticket is still less than the price of the ticket.