Like I said, the only people who make money on systems are those who are selling systems.
Those who buy systems … well, not so much.
A friend and I each received $20 in free casino tokens for buying tickets to the casino’s Thanksgiving Buffet. We were sitting side-by-side at the slot machines. On his first pull, he won $130. He turned to me and said, “I’m going to sell lessons!”
Plus, wtf are you going to do with 500 million (assuming you actually get that after taxes) if you DO win? Buy your own country?
Florida had this relatively high odds game, Jackpot Triple Play, which I figured out may have been marginally rational to bet on IF it rolled over to the $3 million ceiling it had, since you got 3 numbers for a buck (odds a bit over 3 million:1), so I tried it here and there whenever it did. Got $20 once, whee. The $2.2 mil after taxes (and assuming nobody else won-it often rolled over precisely because few played it) would put 99% of anybody into the comfortable for life category, so why get greedy and play the much less likely mega jackpots?
Inexcusable, but hard to notice it anywhere other than Montreal. Once the problem was noted, the implementation was - obviously - corrected. As I recall, the issue was a certain sequence was likely to repeat (something like 1 in 40) so not terribly obvious, but some people have nothing better to do to win thousands of dollars.
I recall a radio program once discussing this, in regard to backward messages in rock songs. The fellow played a song backward, it sounded like gibberish. Then he says "do you hear them saying “‘The girl with the weasel in her mouth’?” When the same clip was replayed, you could hear that. Our brain is trained to try to understand words, we make words out of random sounds if we think we know what is being said. Plus, visually, it’s why we see eyes or faces in random patterns in the dark, or on Mars; or Jesus burned into our toast.
If you have to ask…
That reminds me of this:
Depending on which one you are reading, you may hear something different. (Some work better than others.)
I’ve mentioned my favorite local drawing a few times. It is a Queen of Hearts drawing. Right now the jackpot is $390,000. On a typical week at this stage of the game about 30,000 people buy tickets each week. If you buy 10 tickets your odds of having a ticket drawn are 3,000 to 1. Of course you still have to have the right number selected. There are 42 remaining numbers right now.
The previous 2 games have gone to $3-4 million in the pot. But even when it gets down to only a handful of numbers remaining only about 50-60,000 people play each week.
Sounds like the “Chase the Ace”. I saw some news items about this a few years ago in the Maritime provinces - some local charity running the contest there, and as the pot go into the hundreds of thousands, it turned into a feeding frenzy in the region to get tickets. The other was some radio bingo out west, where the 52-or-less had climbed to a million or more. The charity complained people were chasing their ticket distributors and staking out stores that sold the bingo cards.
Once again proving the adage, “your odds get much better when you actually buy a ticket.”
(It’s like the old joke about the fellow who goes and prays every weekend for years, “Oh Lord! Please help out a poor man like me and let me win the lottery! It’s all I ask of you…”
One day, he’s praying when a big cloud forms above him, a giant hand comes out of it, the finger points at him, and voice booms out… “Bob, you cheap bastard!! You could help me out by buying a ticket once in a while…” )