Assuming you purchaced every combination of ticket, how high would the Powerball Jackpot have to be...?

well the easiest way to compute this is simply take the odds of getting each possible way of winning (this is given at the powerball website), multiply this by the number of tickets purchased (146107962) and then multiply that by the payout for that type of win. Now add all of these up and you will have your total winnings for all tickets except the jackpot. That total is $28,800,092. Now you spent $146,107,962 on tickets so the jackpot payout you recieve would have to be equal to at least the difference between these 2 to break even and that amount is $117,307,870. Now so far the largest jackpot payout was $295.7 million on Jul 29 1998 and after taxes this would have been enough to cover your expenses.

One final note, if you read all the rules posted on the website it mentions that a retailer must report any attempts to purchase a large number of tickets, so to avoid suspision you would have to face the additional dificulty of having to spread out your purchases among several people and locations so none of the individual purchases would raise a flag. Putting all the dificulties togeather I would venture that attempting to do this would be next to impossible

From my understanding, there are 55 white balls and 42 red balls. To get the jackpot, you need to match all five white balls and the red ball. So to exhaust the entire search space, you need to find all combinations of the white balls along with the 42 possible red balls. So we get:

N = (55 choose 5) * 42

N = 3478761 * 42

N = 146107962

So to break even, the jackpot must be at least N (on the order of 146 million). Note this answer matches the table in link #1.

EDIT: I beg to differ with gymdude. He calculated a permutation instead of a combination. Powerball tickets do not require you to match the order in which the balls fall, so any ticket with winning numbers will win. Just remember the last digit is the power ball, and that MUST uniquely match. What that means is, the ticket {1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6} is the same as {5, 4, 3, 2, 1, 6}. This is covered in the Powerball FAQ in link #2.

You can never be GUARANTEED that you will break even. You can only calculate the odds of winning and compare that to the size of the jackpot. Bear in mind also that they don't pay out 100% of the money. A substantial percent is kept by the government. Also, remember, there can be multiple winners. In that case the pot would be equally split among the winners. Larger jackpots are more likely to have multiple winners because more people bet when the jackpot is large.

The answer wil change as powerball will have a new setup in January (more red balls and less white balls).

Currently, the answer would be 56*55*54*53*52*42 =

19,251,872,640

So if you bought this many tickets - all different - you would win, and assuming the jackpot is at least $19,251,872,640 - you'd come out ahead or just break even.

You now have a 1 in 176 million minus 20 chance of winning.

19,251,872,640