I keep seeing commercials for the Heart & Stroke Lottery on TV and it struck me a bit odd. I remember back when the hospitals and charities started putting on lotteries, their tickets were in the $100 range (and $100 was worth more 10 years ago!). Now I noticed that the H&S lottery only cost $25 for a ticket – but I also noticed that they weren’t advertising their material prizes; just cash ones.

I just did a quick check on their website, and it seems their prizes are different than what I saw on the commercial. It turns out that I saw the commercial for their calendar lottery where they were giving away 3x$5000/day, with special $10,000/week and $100,000/month draws over a year. So that works out to a payout of $7.195 million dollars. There’s also 2000x$25/mth winners which brings their grand total to $7.795 million dollars in prizes.

In order to break even, at $25/ticket, they have to sell at least 311,800 tickets. That’s a lot of tickets! That doesn’t account for all the marketing and overhead needed to run the operation; so there must be a lot of people in Canada playing this lottery in order for them to make money on it!

Posted by Kevin in Blogs Tags: charity, lottery, math