the 'MegaMillions' lottery that spans some 40 states is earning its name at the moment, with a jackpot conservatively estimated at 500 million for this Friday's drawing, and likely to be higher still by the time the drawing takes place Friday night at 11pm. I'm going to propose that we have a DailyKos lottery pool, with my idea of how to run it below the fleur de kos.
What I suggest we do is to each buy as many tickets as we want to add to the pool, and I'll post a diary Friday at 5 pm EST. To join the pool, leave a comment with a title of 'My tickets' and list out the sets of numbers of each of your tickets in the comment below. If any of the numbers hits a win above $100k, I then suggest the person who purchases the winning ticket gets half, and the rest is shared among all of the other ticket holders based on the number of tickets they submitted. So if only 3 people enter, and one person gets a winning number worth (for easy math) $200k, that person keeps 100k, and the other people maybe 30k and 70k respectively, if one contributed 3 tickets and the other 7 tickets. Any hit below 100k stays strictly with the winning ticket holder, and is not split by the pool.
(I suggest that any winnings be taken as the lesser 'lump sum' amount, to avoid winding up trying to split yearly prizes for years on end.)
Now, in the extremely unlikely chance that we do win something, hold on to your losing tickets. Because we're going to need to verify that everyone who claimed to be in the pool actually did buy those numbers for that specific lottery, because otherwise, anyone who wanted to could 'pretend' to be in the pool simply to share in if somebody who actually bought tickets wins. So in the event of a big win, we'll need to collect everyone's losing tix as validation that they deserve a piece of the pool.
Obviously, we'll cut off pool entry before the winning numbers are drawn. Drawing is 8pm PDT/11pm EDT, I think it is, Friday night, so we'll cut off pool entry at 7:30PDT/10:30 EDT. (otherwise people could join the pool with losing tickets AFTER they've found out they didn't win without being part of the pool.)
What do folks think? Does this sound like a plan?
Thu Mar 29, 2012 at 8:16 PM PT: We might do the split of the second half evenly instead of proportionately.
I put a poll in my update diary, and so far more people are preferring an even split after the winner gets half, so I'll put that poll in the final diary on Friday as well, and we'll do the split based upon the poll results.