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As of Tuesday afternoon, no one had yet stepped forward to claim their $80 million prize from Lotto Max last Friday, but there are probably lots of Metro Vancouverites imagining what they would do with that record-setting ticket if it had been them.
For most people, lotteries are a harmless way to have a little fun, a University of B.C. psychology professor says, but it’s a wager nonetheless and, like any form of gambling, it can become a problem.
Especially if, as studies have suggested, about a third of Canadians include winning a lottery as part of their retirement plans.
“I think there are two aspects to the appeal of buying lottery tickets and it shows similarities with lots of commercial gambling, recreation, if you like, in the what you’re doing is you’re paying money for a sense of enjoyment, and lotteries in particular, a bit of escapism, a bit of hope,” said Catharine Winstanley, whose research investigates the brain mechanisms involved in impulse control.
“But what you should never do when gambling is think that you’re actually going to win, the odds are absolutely stacked against you, and particularly with lotteries where the chances of winning are infinitesimally small.
“I can’t really overstate that enough.”
Friday’s was the largest lottery prize ever won in B.C. and it’s also the largest lottery prize ever won by a single ticket in Canada. The winning ticket was bought in Surrey.
The last $80 million Lotto Max jackpot prize was split between two winners, from the Dec. 3, 2024, draw. Two winners also split an $80 million Lotto Max jackpot from the Sept. 17, 2024, draw.
For interest’s sake, the payout on the 50/50 draw at the Canucks’ final home game this season was $1.151 million, the fifth-highest 50/50 payout in club history (the highest was $1.414 million in November 2018.).
The odds of winning the 50/50, while still unfavourable to any one ticket purchaser, are a lot better than they are in something like Lotto Max at one in 140,000 or so instead of one in 33 million.
But overall, we’re not that good at assessing astronomical odds such as winning the Lotto Max, said Winstanley, who admits to her family buying a weekly $5 lottery ticket.
“I think the human brain struggles to deal with those kind of numbers very reliably,” she said.
It’s also unlikely to get hit by lightning (but at less than one in a million , still more likely than winning the Lotto Max), yet most homeowners, for example, have building insurance as a precaution.
“Nearly all responsible homeowners carry insurance because we would really, really hate for that terrible thing to happen, and so we spend a few dollars every month to make sure that, if it does happen, we’re covered, but the chances of that happening are really, really, really, really, really, really low in most places.”
Home insurance, in other words, is literally like hedging your bets, she said.
“When we’re talking about very, very unlikely (bets), there’s no insurance for that,” Winstanley said. “The fact that up to a third of Canadians are thinking that the lottery might provide for retirement is very ill-advised and really quite worrying.”
And that’s the thing about buying lottery tickets, rationally it doesn’t make sense.
“In general, humans are very likely to overestimate the chances of something very, very, very, very, very unlikely actually happening,” Winstanley said. “And that feeds into both our level of insurance coverage, which generally is a good thing, because you don’t want to be skewered if things go wrong, and also a tendency to do things like gamble and play lotteries.
“If we would actually computationally work out the chances of winning, and ask ourselves if it’s worth it financially to blow five bucks every week in the hope that our long shot pays off, we say to ourselves, ‘No, you shouldn’t spend that money.’
“But there are other things about gambling that, for most of us, are just harmless recreation.
“You get to buy into that dream: Wouldn’t it be nice if you get to have that conversation with your friends and your partner and have that little sort of thrill of excitement.”
The $80 million winner has a year in which to claim the prize.
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