Quote from: STT on October 11, 2021, 10:35:46 PM

The lottery is going to have a bias towards the largest whale bettors, that is as it should be and also in proportion it still allows everyone a chance no matter how slim. Im reckon Im drawing on my half forgotten stats lessons here but its valid to categorize probabilities which are equal when considering the likelihood of an overall outcome. So if there perhaps is a million people with 10 tickets and one big player accumulated 10 million tickets, individually the little players garner ( 50% / 1m ) chance their exact 10 tickets popping up; while the big player with far more tickets has a 50% chance of winning but if considering either category collectively their chances are equal.
This is why it gets puzzling when the little guy can come through with such an unlikely win, there was always some chance and alot of the time people are getting free entries as well but altogether to consider outcome result per ticket odds the masses of people may have equal or even greater chances then the largest bettors of collecting the weekly lottery. Thats how I view it and I might be off on whether that's the correct way to arrange odds.

I think that is a good way of looking at it.
if you break ticket holders into groups you get this:
group with
1 to 500 tkts ~20% tkts;
500-3,000 -      ~10%;
3,000-5,000       ~45%;
5,000-10,000       ~10%;
10,000-100,000      ~10%;
100,000+        ~5%.

So even though individually whales have better chances than other players
as a group they are less likely to win than any other group.
The largest group is people with 3-5K tickets and we see a lot of them among the winners.