The Numbers Guy, Carl Bialik, warns us not to count on winning the McDonalds $5 million Monopoly game:
Patrons get game pieces with the purchase of certain menu items or by sending in a self-addressed, stamped envelope. To collect the grand prize this year, a customer must gather four game pieces corresponding to the four railroads on the Monopoly game board. The agate-like official rules say the odds of this happening are “approximately 1 in 41,497,391,309.”
“In other words, you have a better chance of getting struck by lightning while on your way home from purchasing a winning Lotto ticket with your wife, Jessica Alba, the first lady of the United States,” Richard Roeper wrote in the Chicago Sun-Times. The odds are also far worse than some estimates of the probability of picking a perfect NCAA bracket, as cited in a Numbers Guy column in March.