ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:
The Powerball jackpot has now jumped to one of the highest in the game's history, an estimated $1.7 billion.
JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
If that number has you thinking of going out right now to buy a ticket, you are not alone. Just know that your chances of winning that jackpot are pretty terrible.
TIM CHARTIER: Whether you like math or not, you're playing a mathematical game.
SHAPIRO: That's Tim Chartier. He's a professor of computer science at Davidson College.
CHARTIER: It turns out that the lottery - your chances of winning are approximately 1 in 300 million. It's 292.2 million, to be precise. But what does that really mean? What that means is that if I picked one second in just over nine years, you have to guess the second. And that's akin to picking the correct lottery ticket.
SHAPIRO: Or to put it a different way...
CHARTIER: The odds can also be looked at as flipping a coin. You actually have better chance of flipping all heads 20 times - quite a bit better - than winning the lottery. And I found that sometimes people think that's, well, I think I can do that. So it's like, well, I'd buy another ticket.
SUMMERS: Now, buying another ticket can improve your odds of winning, but Chartier cautions...
CHARTIER: You look at it as that one second in nine years. It's like having two guesses or 10 guesses. A lot of it, to me, comes down to your budget and then how much are you willing to spend, given that you're probably not going to win?
SHAPIRO: And that's why something like a lottery pool is popular. The idea is a group of people - maybe your co-workers, maybe your friends - put money into a pool to buy as many tickets as possible in the hopes that one of them might be the big winner. Theoretically, the prize would then be split among everyone who bought in.
SUMMERS: As you can imagine, with all of that money on the line, the situation can quickly get complicated. Here's lawyer Mark Harder.
MARK HARDER: You know, people claim the ticket was - the winning ticket was their personal ticket and not part of the office pool ticket. I've seen cases where there have been disputes among the parties over, you know, what their shares would be. Or somebody didn't kick their money in, but they still think they're part of the pool.
SHAPIRO: There's no shortage of office lottery horror stories like the time employees at a bakery won a $118 million jackpot. That is, until several other co-workers claimed they deserved a share of the dough, too. Or when one man sued his colleagues claiming they excluded him from office pool winnings because he was on vacation.
SUMMERS: Stories like these are why Harder says, before you join the office pool, establish rules about things like who's in the pool and who's buying the tickets. Most importantly, though, he says leave a paper trail.
HARDER: You know, obviously, writing is always best.
SHAPIRO: Harder knows this firsthand because he's an attorney who focuses on estate planning and because he represented three winners of an $842 million Powerball drawing. They called themselves The Breakfast Club.
HARDER: The client liked the movie. They liked breakfast.
SUMMERS: Those three winners reached out to Harder because in many states, winning the lottery means revealing your personal identity - something the group was not comfortable doing.
SHAPIRO: Well, in the unlikely event that you and your co-workers do win the Powerball, Harder suggests you put your personal privacy and safety first. Keep it quiet.
HARDER: If you have the option to remain anonymous, I would strongly encourage you to take that.
SUMMERS: Believe me, Ari, if I win the lottery, you won't hear it from me, but I think you'll be able to tell.
SHAPIRO: I'll keep a secret.
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