This is a story about how two dudes from Tampa, Florida, got 270 people to fork over at least $500 each to form a $146,000 Powerball pool of 73,000 tickets.
The Powerball jackpot is worth $1.5 billion. Yet according to the Tampa Bay Times, with so many people involved, everybody would get a comparably paltry $1.9 million each if one of their tickets has the winning numbers. That’s a lot of money for one person, though.
How did the organizers, Ryan McGuinness and Shane Krugman, persuade so many people to buy in? Facebook, of course. Previously, people had contributed $15,000, then $19,000 worth of tickets, when the jackpot was only in the hundreds of millions of dollars. The jackpot going over $1 billion is “when everything went nuts.”
And why did they let so many people participate? “At different points we were like, ‘should we cap it?’ ” said Krugman. “But the more people, the more chances, so it would be foolish not to take their money.” Each member of this group now has a 1 in 4,000 chance of winning, compared to the 1 in 292.2 million chance that the rest of us have.
The real winners may be the store that McGuinness and Krugman bought the tickets from. The store owner apparently gets a 5 percent commission on each ticket sold, and a $100,000 bonus for selling the winning ticket.
(Via Tampa Bay Times)