Janet Miles

In the online game Kingdom of Loathing, one can purchase raffle tickets. A raffle is drawn every night.

My friend D WINOLJ asked,

"It's fairly obvious, from a lot of different sources, that the folks that are winning the raffles are (more often than not) buying mass quantities of raffle tickets. Now, it's obvious that being in a postion to afford to do so, and buying large numbers of tickets per drawing, radically improves one's odds of winning. But my question is this: which would have better odds: buying, say, 10 tickets each day, so that one had a (small) chance in each of 10 drawings, or playing once in 10 days and buying 100 tickets?"

To which I said,

"Gah. I have no idea how to even approach that. I suspect, but am probably wrong, that it might depend on how many total entries there are each day, so as to consider whether 100 tickets is a statistically significantly larger proportion of total entries than 10 tickets. But I'm not sure.

However, nearly all knowledge is contained in LJ, and I have a couple of statisticians on my friends list, so if you'd like, I'd be happy to pose the question."

Any comments, ideas, thoughts, jeers?