Florida Megapool Spent $146,000 On Powerball Tickets And Each Won Enough For A Cheap Case Of Beer

“Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things. And no good thing ever dies,” we whispered to ourselves after we poured the last of our paychecks into a flurry of Powerball tickets. Fucking Andy Dufresne from Shawshank was full of shit man.

We all should have listened to Friedrich Nietzsche when he accurately said, “in reality, hope is the worst of all evils, because it prolongs the torments of man.”

No group of people could have used this advice more than Florida this mega-pool, which spent $146,000 on 73,500 tickets and will likely redeem just enough for them to buy a couple bottles of liquor to drown their sorrows.

According to the Tampa Bay Times, the group was started by two Tampa friends when the jackpot was just $400 million and ballooned to more than 270 participants, some of which spent thousands of dollars in hopes of winning that ‘fuck you’ money.

The group increased their odds from 1 in 292.2 million to 1 in 4,000, which by most standards is still a snowballs chance in hell.

It’s not clear how much they won but the Tampa Bay Times claims that  they’ll probably only walk away with $15,000–equating to roughly $55 each, and just over 10% of each person’s original $500 investment.

Ryan McGuinness, one of the two original organizers is still keeping an optimistic outlook: “We’ll roll (the winnings) into new tickets for the next jackpot and roll until we bust.”

You can also just have a giant bonfire and use the $147,000 as kindling. Just spitballing here.

[h/t GQ]

Matt Keohan Avatar
Matt’s love of writing was born during a sixth grade assembly when it was announced that his essay titled “Why Drugs Are Bad” had taken first prize in D.A.R.E.’s grade-wide contest. The anti-drug people gave him a $50 savings bond for his brave contribution to crime-fighting, and upon the bond’s maturity 10 years later, he used it to buy his very first bag of marijuana.