A lottery advertisement suggesting Icelanders can stop a Norwegian cat lady winning the pan-Nordic “Viking Lotto” is misleading, reports Kjarninn.
“This Norwegian cat lady is going to win 150 million, only you can stop her,” reads the ad.
However, buying Viking Lotto tickets would not stop anyone else – in this case the Norwegian cat lady – from winning the lottery.
In fact, the odds of winning the Viking Lotto are approximately 1 in 12.271.512 and those odds are the same for anyone, including the cat lady.
This means that a person who bought a tickets with ten rows of numbers every week – 520 rows each year – could statistically expect to win every 23.500 years.
As journalist Halldór Oddsson points out, the only way to “stop” another person winning would be to have the same numbers as another winner – thereby forcing the other winner to share the prize and taking a portion of “their” prize winnings. The flip side however, is that you are also sharing “your” winnings with them.
The Viking Lottery is drawn every Wednesday.
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