Patty Wilson can't resist a $700 million Powerball jackpot.
The Delray Beach woman bought a ticket for Saturday night's drawing Thursday.
"Why not, a little game is always fun," she says looking at her ticket with numbers matching the ages of her grandchildren.
Why are Wilson and so many others compelled to buy a ticket when jackpots are so high, instead of then they're a modest few million dollars.?
"Money can buy fantasy," explains Dr. Raul Rodriguez, a psychiatrist at Delray Beach Center for Healing.
He says it's all about escaping stress by living a "what if" scenario.
"An unusually large amount of money would exceed the mental threshold for most people and they will have this reaction of the fantasy and how life would be different," Rodriguez says, explaining some people can take the fantasy too far.
He says you have a better chance coping with the disappointment of losing by playing in a pool with co-workers or family.
Keiser Universityfinance professor Mark Bush, Ph.D. says your odds of winning are low: 1 in 292,201,338. They don't change depending on how many people buy tickets, or if you pre-pick your numbers, versus allowing the machine to randomly pick them.
You have a better chance of being crushed to death by a vending machine than winning the jackpot.
And if you do win, you have an incredibly high chance of losing it all.
"Two out of three people, according to the Wall Street Journal would potentially go broke by winning the lotto," Bush points out.
Before you blow all the money, we decided to have some fun. Say you won the jackpot and ended up with 700,000,000 one-dollar bills. Bush says you'd have enough to place end to end around the equator 2.66 times. That's approximately 66,290 miles.
If you'd rather spend the money, you could feed 1,700 American families of four for one year.
Or invites about 1,300 friends on a 101-night cruise around the world leaving San Francisco on January 24.
Huge jackpots come and go, but one thing never changes. You can't win, if you don't play.
Saturday's drawing will be the largest jackpot in United States lottery history.
