Lottery information; jackpot fixation

For a specific lottery I can often find where they quote the odds of winning the different levels of prizes. However, I do not see a convenient cross-lottery database of these. Instead, as far as I can tell, people seem obsessed with the jackpots.

I hear of EuroMillions jackpots exceeding £100M and react by thinking that I do not want to play that lottery: even after the IRS take tax from it, £10M would make quite enough difference to me that if I were to play lotteries at all then I would much rather play one that instead paid out rather more £10M prizes but nothing much higher, probably also not so many £sub-10k prizes either: after all, I recently discovered that I have wholly forgotten about one week's holiday in North Carolina that I probably much enjoyed at the time. That is, I would want to maximize my chances of a personally meaningful win.

The odds information does seem to be out there and it would be trivial to write software such that one can supply a meaningful win range and it tells one which lottery to play. Does this exist and I am simply missing it? It feels so feasible.

Maybe there is a lack of demand for such a calculation. Perhaps the kind of people who do like lotteries much enjoy the excitement of thinking enormous wins remotely plausible or they enjoy occasionally winning trivial amounts or they focus on trying to pick winning numbers or something instead of on adjusting for nonlinear utility.

Diagrams, a postscript

Having mentioned considering Cairo for diagram generation I thought that it may be usefully illustrative to share a couple of past diagrams representing those I have previously generated via PostScript^® code:


shows a simple arrangement of some sensors and their view of some targets.


shows an undersea map where the marked regions have a specific magnetic field strength: the meandering black lines are an isopleth. Both diagrams were generated from data structures from my software: for the field map the grayscale is achieved by shaded fills of a mesh of triangles whose vertices are sample points. I did Delaunay triangulation in Haskell which output shfill commands for the rendering.