[jallen_dot_dev]

Nice, I had heard of the Kelly Criterion before but never thought to consider applying it to this situation. It's fantastic if the mathematically correct amount to wager (for any ordinary person) is less than $2 which rounds to 0 tickets which supports my intuition to not play.

Your second paragraph touches on another thought I had, which is why people think it's only worthwhile to play when the jackpot is $600M+. Any of us would be happy to win just $20M so why not play for every jackpot? Again it comes down to that misleading EV calculation, which I believe doesn't even matter if you are only going to buy 1 ticket only. Wagering based on the EV would only make sense if it was feasible to buy on the order of 100M tickets. Then you'd have a reasonable shot of winning each jackpot. And playing enough jackpots, you would come out ahead.