Did you spend a load of money on Powerball tickets? Yeah, me, too. Sorry you're not on your way to the Seychelles right now. Cheer up. At least you didn't blow $500 getting into this misguided Florida mega-pool, which spent $146,000 on 73,500 tickets and will likely recoup next to none of it.

According to the Tampa Bay Times, the group was started by two Tampa-based friends back when the jackpot was a mere $400 million, but it soon grew to more than 270 participants, some of whom spent thousands of dollars in the hope that they'd take home a bigger share of the winnings.

I know what you're thinking. Those clever bastards. That's so many tickets. How could they not win?!

Well, pretty easily. The pool did dramatically increase their odds of winning from 1 in 292.2 million to 1 in 4,000, but they failed to realize that 1 in 4,000 is still pretty bad odds. Especially when you're coughing up $500 a pop. Although it's not clear exactly how much they won, it's pretty easy to figure out that they didn't buy any of the winning tickets or win any of the $1 million sub-prizes. In fact, the Tampa Bay Times was able to figure out they'll probably only walk away with $15,000. That's roughly $55 each, and just over 10% of each person's original $500 investment.

Well, lesson learned. You can't cheat the system.

Oh, wait, what's that you say Ryan McGuinness, one of the two original organizers?

"We'll roll (the winnings) into new tickets for the next jackpot and roll until we bust."

Good luck with that.