The official lottery offers fun, convenience, and information to players on the go.

Americans spend an estimated $100 billion on lottery tickets each year, making it the country’s most popular form of gambling. But while state lotteries promote the money they raise as a way to help the poor, it ends up being a small drop in the bucket when looking at overall state revenue.

While many people buy lottery tickets for the big prizes, human beings have a hard time understanding risk when it comes to very large, improbable outcomes, says Victor Matheson, an economics professor at the College of the Holy Cross in Massachusetts. So it’s not surprising that people have quote-unquote “systems” that don’t actually jibe with statistical reasoning, like buying tickets at lucky stores at certain times of day, or selecting the most expensive numbers.

But the truth is that, on average, you’re not going to win. Lotteries have become more common in recent years, thanks to rising interest rates and other factors, but that doesn’t mean the odds are any different than they were 10 years ago.

Lotteries have been around for centuries, with some evidence of their origins in the Low Countries in the 15th century, where towns held public lotteries to collect money to build town fortifications and help the needy. But the modern state-run lottery is much more recent, with the first one established in Puerto Rico in 1934 and then New Hampshire in 1964.