Suppose I play a lottery that has 300 tickets. I can only buy one ticket per draw.
Statistically speaking, shouldn't I win once every 300 draws?
Is it more complicated than this?
Edit
This question has generated much more response than I had imagined. Thank you all, for your input and your great explanations.
To go into further details:
The lottery has 300 tickets. You can buy 1 ticket per draw.
Every draw, is all new tickets, so in essence, you can hold 1 out of 300 numbers, at each draw.
Edit
Just to give some funny (not really funny) side info.
I have now played 1,104 times, and still have not won anything. I suppose I am EXTREMELY unlucky.
Best Answer
Yes it is. The probability of winning $k$ times out of $n$ lotteries is determined from a binomial distribution:
$$P(K=k) = \binom{n}{k} p^k (1-p)^{n-k}$$
where $n=300$, $k=1$, and $p=1/300$. The answer is about $0.368494$, or $36.8\%$. The probability of winning at least once is
$$P(K \ge 1) = 1- P(K=0) = 1-\left( \frac{299}{300} \right )^{300} \approx 0.632735$$
or about $63.3\%$ chance of winning something. Not bad, but not $100\%$.