I voted against the passage of a state lottery in Tennessee, and since it was enacted I’ve played exactly twice — one scratch-off ticket, and one time when we had our first online game — more for curiosity, to see how it worked, than anything else. (Reporters are supposed to be curious.)

Anyway, I was amazed by the people this week who have told news reporters that they only play Powerball when the jackpot gets big. (A record jackpot, $340 million, was won this week.) As I say, I’m not a lottery player, but this strategy makes exactly zero sense. The Powerball jackpot starts at $10 million — are these people claiming that a piddling $10 million jackpot isn’t worth their time and trouble? The odds are astronomical either way. If you enjoy buying a ticket every now and then, and it’s a fun pipedream, I guess it’s harmless enough — but what difference, in practice, is there between winning $10 million and $340 million? Either figure would be life-changing. Frankly, once you get past a certain dollar figure, I would think the extra money would be more of a burden than a benefit.

The odds of picking the winning numbers for a given drawing are the same regardless of the size of the jackpot or how many tickets are sold, although the flurry of ticket-buying that accompanies a really-large jackpot increases the possibility that you might have to split the jackpot with someone else who also picked the winning numbers. A $340 million jackpot might be worth “only” $170 million, or perhaps $113.3 million, or even $85 million.

Hardly worth walking into the convenience store.