Re: this column.
I’m a little surprised the Cecil failed to address in his column the only known attempt to cheat a U.S. government lottery, the 1980 Pennsylvania Lottery Scandal. It was actually rather clever, and if the conspirators hadn’t gotten greedy and overwagered, they probably would have gotten away with it.
Sua
Re the linked column- Why say in several hundred words what you could say in fifteen- " the only way to increase your odds of winning the lottery is buying more tickets". :rolleyes:
I have a more basic quibble with Cecil’s column.
He says bypassing numbers 1-31 is not of real value. “A reasonable notion, perhaps. But divvying the boodle is not a major problem for most people who play.”
Why not? If you know that people bet their birthdays (and perhaps other key numbers like their age) why wouldn’t your odds go way up betting on high numbers.
And as for divving, the vast majority of wins are not for the grand prize but the smaller prizes. If you split every win with others, the odds of breaking even go way down.
Your odds are the same no matter which numbers you pick. The odds of having to split the winnings are low anyway, but would decrease if most people bet 1-31 and you bet 32+.
If we’re talking about lotto games such as Powerball and Megamillions, the prize amounts for everything but the grand prize are the same fixed amount no matter how many winners there are and no matter what the jackpot amount is.
In most systems, you only split the jackpot, so betting certain numbers only increases your odds for the jack pot, not the smaller, more frequent prizes. Your jackpot odds are so low to begin with though, it would be like giving a Tic Tac to a whale.
Again, the odds do not increase or decrease. The potential payout value increases, if we presume that a significant number of players play numbers between 1 - 31. That is, the chance you are going to share the payout decreases if you pick numbers less likely to be picked by others.
I know that, in the early days of the NJ lottery, those who bet on 0-0-0 did very well. But I’m pretty sure it’s smoothed out by now.
There was an attempt in the early 1990’s to “buy out” the Irish lottery. A syndicate aimed to buy every possible combination of numbers for one draw; it was widely publicised at the time, and they banked on making a profit on multiple four and five number combos just as much as winning the jackpot.
After that, they increased the numbers from 36 to 42, changing the odds so that a later attempt would be pointless.
I’m worried about the method that choses the numbers least likely to be chosen by other users, thus minimising the chance that I’ll have to share my winnings with someone else.
Surely, this just guarantees that I’ll share my winnings with all those other people clever enough to work out what the least likely combination of numbers will be? There will probably be thousands of them!
There are a few numbers likely to be chosen, but myriad numbers unlikely to be chosen. If I choose my numbers by rolling dice in the range 32 to whatever, I’ll get something that won’t be hit by birthdays. If someone else rolls dice in the same range, they’ll also get something that won’t be hit by birthdays. But they’re almost certainly not going to get the same thing as me.
On the Irish lottery brute-force, I’m not sure I see how the lotto was “vulnerable” to attack. The only reason the jackpot got high enough to be worth attacking was that it had gone unwon for several drawings in a row, meaning that it had already turned a profit. And even without a syndicate involved, there would still be a winner eventually, and when that happened, they would be paying out the same amount regardless. What’s the problem, here?
IMO, the problem for the Lotto in that case was actually in the non-jackpot match 5 and 4 amounts, which represented nearly £600,000, not all of which would be paid out on a regular draw.
Actually, IIRC, there wasn’t a “problem” in the legal sense. The lottery was set up in such a way that it was mathematically possible to buy up all the combinations of numbers for less than the actual payout. It was perfectly legal to do this. I seem to remember that it was on a holiday weekend when they added an extra £500,000 or something to the prize, making that draw the target: even if the prize money hadn’t rolled over, it would still be a high payout for the jackpot.
The problem for the lottery company was that they didn’t agree this this was “playing fair”, and they didn’t want to look like dupes to this kind of scheme, which is why they tried to scupper the plan, and why they increased the numbers from 36 to 42 some time later.
There were lottery terminals shut down all over the country by the lottery company to stop the syndicate getting their tickets in. Stefan Klincewicz became a minor celebrity at the time.
One of the guys in that syndicate won a house in a newspaper competition a couple of years ago by a similar method: he bought thousands of copies of the newpaper to get the entry tokens, shortening the odds way down in his favour.
Right. It isn’t that the lottery loses money on the deal; it is that the average Joe who buys tickets doesn’t want to be one-upped by someone with a ton of cash who can take advantage of an over-loaded jackpot to ensure winning a piece of the pie. Takes the fun out of it all.
I thought this sounded strange, so I looked it up: MegaMillions Payoff System. It turns out that in California, all lottery prized are parimutuel. So out here it is better to pick less-chosen numbers. Interestingly enough, they don’t provide that information.
It’s not a problem for most people who play because most people who play will never, ever, win.
I remember when the California lottery had an ad campaign featuring celebrities. The ads would display their chosen numbers and then the celebrity would be pictured below with the text “These are my lottery numbers.” If I recall correctly the advertisements were related to the fact that some of the lottery profits go to the California Department of Education ( http://www.calottery.com/Support/LotteryFunds/ )
Anyway, the advertisement that I thought was the funniest was one featuring Steve Wozniak (one of the founders of Apple Computers):
“1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5 - 6
These are my lottery numbers because they have the same likelihood of winning as any other combination.”
I personally thought that the ad might discourage people from playing the lottery.
List of winning lotter numbers going back years are readily available on the Web, with statistics and charts and everything you might need to give you an “advantage” in picking your numbers.
For every person who picked “5” this week because it has been appearing a lot recently, there is someone else who picked “22” because it hasn’t appeared in a long time and it’s due.
Sorry, I wasn’t clear. By “less chosen numbers” I meant less chosen by the players, not less chosen by the system as a winning numbers. So, yes, they do provide to the public lists of winning numbers. Nice, but not the info I want. I want to know the statistics of which numbers are most frequently played by the players.
I see what you meant now. That would be interesting information, purely from a sociological perspective. My guess is that “Lucky 7” and “Unlucky 13” are chosen the most. Next would be all of the others between 1 and 31 because people like to choose their and their loved one’s birthdays.