Frequently asked questions
My name is Ken, founder of kenslottopool.com. I worked as an equity research analyst at Morgan Stanley for the last 20+ years before being diagnosed with cancer at the end of 2021. As you can imagine, I have amazing organizational skills and great attention to detail (which is probably what kept me employed on Wall Street for two-plus decades!). I live in Connecticut with my wife and kids. If you want to know more about me, just google “Ken Zerbe Morgan Stanley”.
I started this lottery pool at work, maybe five or six years ago, so I’ve learned a lot about how to efficiently organize and manage the pool. In fact, organizing the pool at work is what inspired me to do open this up to a broader audience. We’ve purchased well over $200,000 worth of tickets (since I started keeping track) for the pool, and as the number of participants has grown, we are now buying anywhere from $1,500 (for small jackpots) to $7,000 (larger jackpots) in tickets each drawing that we play.
My goal is to design this entire process to be as open and transparent as possible. Before you contribute anything to our lottery pool, call me… email me… FaceTime me. I’m sure that once you see my face and we talk for a minute, you’ll be a lot more comfortable with participating in our lottery pool.
And most importantly, I’ll send you an email with the lottery tickets we purchased before the drawing and will document your contribution to the pool (also before the drawing happens) and how much you should expect to win if we hit the jackpot.
Each person contributes whatever amount they want to the lottery pool, and that entitles you to a percentage of the jackpot, if we win. If you contribute $50 and the total pool is $1,000, then you would get 5% of the jackpot (less taxes, legal fees, etc.). I, Ken, will act as the lottery pool organizer, and will keep track of everyone’s contribution, take pictures of all the tickets, send out emails ahead of the drawings, and will be the point person in working with the lawyers and accountants when we win.
You can contribute using cash, Venmo, PayPal, or Zelle. Once you sign up, I will send you an email with more specific instructions. But the short answer is that the email will have links to my accounts. And when you send in your contribution, my Venmo/PayPal/Zelle apps will show your name which lets me attribute your contribution to you.
Whatever you want. People have contributed as little as $1 (well, just one person really) while others have contributed well over $1,000 (although I do not recommend that for new players). The average contribution over the last several years is around $12, but that tends to move higher as the jackpot gets larger. Just contribute whatever you are comfortable with.
No, not every time. Running a lottery pool is a lot of work! So I usually just start the pool when either one of the jackpots reaches $200-300 million (although I have started it at a lower amount in the past). There will also be times where we will not play because it just won’t be possible for me to buy the tickets and send emails out to everyone (usually for health reasons, like chemo, being in the hospital, etc. Yes, cancer sucks). I will email everyone ahead of time, so you know exactly which lotteries we are playing.
We will only play Mega Millions or Powerball. Which one depends on which one has the larger jackpot at the time. I will be very clear which lottery we are playing when I send you an email at the start of the lottery period (or contribution period, or open period, etc.) so you know exactly what we are doing.
Also, we do not play the Megaplier or Power Play. We just buy regular $2 tickets. We are all here to win the jackpot and I’d rather put the money toward more tickets rather than the Megaplier, etc.
No, I do not charge any explicit fees. I will collect the money, buy the tickets, send out emails, etc., because I actually enjoy doing this. I want to win the lottery and I know that being in a pool greatly improves our odds of winning. That said, I do keep the very small winnings, like if a ticket wins a $2 Megaball or $4 Powerball number. I guess you can call it a fee, but it’s more like the cost of doing business. Running the lottery pool is fun, but it is a huge amount of work! Larger winnings will get distributed back to the participants.
I will never buy tickets outside of the pool. So there will be no chance that I will win without all of us winning together. It just gets too messy and opens me up to lawsuits. All my own contributions will be part of the pool. Either we all win, or none of us win.
If we win the jackpot, it will be taken as a lump cash sum, rather than the annuity option.
For smaller winnings: If your proportional winnings are more than you put into the pool in any given drawing (i.e. the total winnings are more than the total pool size, but equal or less than $10,000), then I’ll send you the after-tax winnings the same way you gave it to me. The important point is that the winnings need to be more than what we collected for the pool to be distributed (i.e. if the pool is $3,000 and we win $200, then nothing is paid out. But if the pool is $3,000 and we win $10,000, then everything gets distributed to those who participated in that drawing).
For larger winnings: Larger winnings means that the pool wins more than what we contributed in a single drawing (including the jackpot, of course). So if the pool is $3,000 and we win $10,000, then that is considered ‘larger winnings’ and it will get paid out to everyone in the pool. If we win $10,000 but the pool is $100,000, then nothing is paid out (the main reason is that I’d be sending $0.10 to everyone on their $1, which just doesn’t make sense from a time perspective). If we win more than we contribute, I’ll notify everyone immediately. For payouts of $50,000 or less, I’ll pay the taxes on those winnings and will send everyone their proportional winnings. For anything above $50,000 (i.e. $1 mil or the jackpot), I will hire a lawyer (to represent all of us), tax accountant, and anyone else that I deem necessary and pay their fees and all other expenses out of the pool’s gross winnings. The lawyer or accounting firm will be in touch as to how to distribute and claim your winnings.
This task falls mostly to my wife (she enjoys it), but I help out when the pile of tickets gets too large for one person to handle. In short, we use the CT Lottery app, which has a QR code scanner. We scan each ticket individually from our house, usually the morning after the drawing while drinking our coffee. Smaller pools (about $1,500) only take about 30-45 mins for one person, but larger pools ($6-7,000) can take several hours.
The average winnings from large lottery pools is around 4-5% of the total pool contributions. This means that if our combined contribution is $100, then we should expect to ‘win’ about $4-5. If you contributed $2 to the pool, then your portion of the winnings would be $0.08 to $0.10. We are all here to win the jackpot and change our lives forever. I’m happy to run the pool, because it means I have a much greater chance of winning (as do you), but it isn’t worth it for me to send back $0.08 to $0.10 on everyone’s $2 contribution — especially when we have several hundred people participating. I will only proactively distribute the winnings if we win more than you contributed (i.e. more than $2 on your $2 contribution).
Since I started the lottery pool in 2016, we’ve purchased $288,000 in tickets, or 144,000 tickets (as of Nov 2022). The largest prize we’ve ever won was a $500 ticket, and that happened once. While you might think we would have won more, the odds would say otherwise. Using Powerball for example, the odds of winning a $100 ticket are 1 in 36,525 (four white balls) and 1 in 14,494 (three white balls and the Powerball). Using the better of the two odds, you would expect to win about ten $100 tickets if you bought 144,000 tickets like we did (144,000 / 14,494 = 9.93) — and that’s probably about what has happened. The next prize up is $50,000 and those odds are 1 in 913,129. So given we purchased 144,000 tickets, our odds of winning $50,000 since the pool began were about 15.8%, and that hasn’t happened yet.
All tickets purchased will be Quick Picks (random, computer-generated numbers).
No. If your state or jurisdiction doesn’t allow gambling, then please do not participate. States that do not participate in either Mega Millions or Powerball, from what I can tell, include Alabama, Alaska, Hawaii, Nevada, and Utah. That said, I’m not going to check where you live. If we win the jackpot and you become a multi-millionaire, you can have your lawyer help you resolve any ‘geographic’ issues you might have.