Quote Originally Posted by craig View Post
Okay, I'll buy the "if I buy 200 tickets then I have to win" point. That's not how Famous advertised it IIRC, but if they worded it so that you and others drew that conclusion, then they were wrong.

Note, however, that the statement does not hold true for the chances published for any lottery or game of chance, or in probability and statistics. It is usually defined in terms of what happens on average; in the long run. You flip a fair coin; chances are 1 in 2 that you'll get a head in one flip. The odds don't guarantee that you'll get a head - and only one head - if you flip a coin twice (or flip two coins simultaneously).
The analogy doesn't hold. If you flip a coin twice you have a chance of getting 2 heads because after you get the first one the heads are back in play. In the situation where you draw 2 balls out of a bucket, the first ball is not in play after it is drawn. So 2 draws will always yield one of each ball.

In the case of 2 balls in the bucket you have a 2 in 2 chance of winning. In the case of the coin being flipped twice you always have a 1 in 2 chance of getting heads no matter how many times you flip the coin. Now if you're saying that they will draw 5 times (or any number of times for that matter) from a bucket containing 1000 balls and they will throw the winning ball back in the bucket after each draw, then you never have better than 1 in 1000 chance of winning.