LotteryHow Rare Is a Losing Streak?
News headlines love "Powerball goes 41 drawings without a winner" — this calculates how unusual that actually is, given real math.
Chance no one wins in a single drawing
—
Chance of this exact streak, under this assumption
—
—
Important: "tickets sold per drawing" is a number you enter, not real sales data — we don't have access to actual ticket sales figures, which vary enormously (a small early-jackpot drawing might sell a few million tickets; a drawing right before a huge advertised jackpot can sell tens of millions). The single-ticket jackpot odds (e.g. 1 in 292,201,338 for Powerball) don't by themselves tell you how likely it is that nobody wins in a given drawing — that depends on how many tickets were actually in play, which this tool asks you to estimate rather than pretending to know.
The Math
If tickets are independent (each with the same small chance of matching), the probability that none of them win in one drawing is (1 − p)tickets, where p is the single-ticket jackpot probability. The probability of that happening N drawings in a row is that same figure raised to the Nth power. This is the identical formula (just applied to "the whole field of tickets" instead of "you personally") already used and verified for the long-term odds calculator.