How many lottery tickets guarantee a win?

Does anyone know how many lottery number combinations are possible? I wonder how many tickets would be needed to have a 100% chance of winning. www.calottery.com shows some related info that would make it easier to do the numbers, but I'm at work and can't get into that site.

How many lottery tickets guarantee a win?sheet music

If you had enough money to buy all of the possible ways, you wouldnt need to play the lottery!

How many lottery tickets guarantee a win?state theatre opera theater

There is no possible way to buy enough tickets to guarantee a lottery win. In fact, the odds are so great against it, that even if you bought 100 tickets instead of 1, you will still have the same odds. You essentially have the same odds of winning with 1 ticket as with 100 but you are 99 dollars richer...
Lets say there are 5 numbers drawn and there are 42 numbers to choose from.

42x41x40x39x38 is the way to figure out the number of tickets you would have to buy to assure that all combinations possible were in your hand.

So this particular lottery would require 102,080,160 tickets to insure that you would win.
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As for possible ticket number combinations, you can calculate that with simple multiplication:

number of numbers in the first spot

x number of numbers in the second spot

x ...

x number of numbers in the last spot

The number of combinations will be astronomical, for the caLottery.com's Mega Millions the calculation would be: 56 x56 x56 x56 x56 x46 = 25,333,661,696

So you want to be guarantee of winning something? To be 100% certain of winning the grand prize you'd have to buy every single ticket. For the Mega Millions Bill Gates could wing it the $25 billion cost of purchasing every ticket once or twice. If you missed even one ticket there would be a risk that that ticket could be the grand prize winner, so be sure to buy everything. If there were 100 prizes to be won, you could get away with purchasing all the tickets except for 99 of them, and still be guaranteed to win something at least one prize.

Even if you could buy every single ticket, dishing out $25 billion to win an $82 million jackpot wouldn't be very smart.

What if you bought just half the available tickets? Then your odds of winning are also 50%.

Lets say you buy one Mega Millions ticket, then your odds are 1 in 25 billion, ie 1/25 billion which is for all intents and purposes zero. One poster suggested buying 100 tickets is the same as just one ticket odds wise. This is not true. If you have 100 tickets, your chances of winning are 100 times more than with just one ticket, but the problem is that 100 times the odds of one ticket which is essentially zero, is still essentially zero.

Why buy a lottery ticket at all? Entertainment value, as maybe just maybe...

Hope this all helps.

Bill