Hey, if buying one ticket makes sense, then surely buying more than one ticket makes more sense. So you should spend all your $65m buying lottery tickets for the $49m jackpot lottery. If each $2 has an expected $3.50 return, then $65m's worth of tickets will have an expected $113m return! Bingo. Safe as houses.
Or perhaps this is an absurd argument, as proven by the above reductio ad absurdum, and you should keep your money to spend it on things that make sense.
But don't let me stop you. After all, the people who run the lottery need to eat too.
Your comment reminds me of a group which, I apologize for being vague on the details of, planned to buy as many lottery tickets as needed to have a 1/1 chance of winning. I can't remember if that meant just getting enough individual numbers that their odds "went up" or if they were actually planning to purchase all the possible number combinations. Irrelevant I suppose.
Probability math aside, they were able to raise the funds required to purchase the necessary tickets, but were eventually undone in a rather unexpected way... turns out, it's harder to procure 2 million lottery tickets than they had anticipated. The day of, they simply weren't able to get enough tickets to make it happen.
I honestly don't remember if they won or lost, but I remember expecting them to fail through having to split the winnings, throwing their math off... as if it weren't already off anyway.
If I am not mistaken, it happened in Australia, and while they were not able to cover all the numbers, they did win (they had covered 90%+ of combinations).
Or perhaps this is an absurd argument, as proven by the above reductio ad absurdum, and you should keep your money to spend it on things that make sense.
But don't let me stop you. After all, the people who run the lottery need to eat too.