Yes, I play 'em. Yes, I know it’s foolish, but, hey, I’ve spent $3 on dumber sh*t. If I win, I can stop worrying about my future. When I lose, I’m a proud Hoosier taxpayer.
Decades ago, I actually tried one of those theories, where you make charts, and choose numbers by a handful of non-scientific rules of probabilities. Every week for a year or so, I bought anywhere between 10 and 18 tickets, all carefully picked according to the system. There’s probably a phone app for it, now.
I lost nearly every time, and I lost all the time I wasted with the charts. I don’t mind telling you I was a pure-dee fool to do it. :smack:
I put in $5 on the office pool once every few months (the ladies up front only organize one when the jackpot gets way up there). I also buy scratch-off tickets as a treat for family members once or twice a year, as a little surprise. Never more than $2 or so for each person.
If there’s a big jackpot, my husband and I will sometimes buy a ticket. Then we spend the evening discussing how we’ll divvy up the money. We’ve bought maybe four or five tickets in the last fifteen years.
I did buy a scratch ticket once. We were driving down I95 and we stopped for gas. I went in to get drinks and snacks and there was a whole crowd of people around the lottery counter. I asked the cashier what they were doing and he said they were buying scratch tickets, so I told him to give me one. I scratched it off and won $25! Woohoo! I didn’t make any friends with all the people standing there, though.
My mother-in-law and her sister bought a ticket together and won $150,000. Nice little stash for a couple of pensioners. My MIL used it to come visit us in the U.S. (from Australia), bought a new car and pretty much gave the rest away. She’s not a regular lottery player - it was a purchase made on a whim one afternoon.
For most of my life I didn’t buy any lottery tickets, but I was still fantasizing about what I would do if I won. I realized that it was really stupid to imagine the winnings if I never even had a chance, so I started buying tickets fairly regularly. Not because I think I might win, but just so I have a license to dream.
While I do happen to be a mathematician, I don’t believe this. Rather I believe that it is a regressive tax on poor people, and I think it’s immoral of our governments to tax poverty in this way. To put it another way, I think judging the addict is stupid, but I heartily support judging the pusher.
My anecdotal evidence about it being a poor-tax:
I used to commute regularly with a stop-over in Newark Penn Station. In that station, there’s a little convenience store whose lottery kiosk faces into the middle of the walkway. Thus, it was impossible to not see the line of people waiting to buy tickets. And these people were always on average poorer that the average person in that station. Yes, these people were buying a chance to dream, but they also looked the least able to afford it.
I tend to buy them when traveling as a cheap souvenir to put in my travel journal. Over the years, I’ve also bought a few when the mood struck me. Never won anything big though.
No, never. I can do enough math to realize that I’m not going to win and I get no thrill out of it, so there’s no reason to. I have better things to waste four bucks on.
Not as obnoxious as people repeating the same tired “tax on bad math” line over and over and over again, every single time the subject is raised.
It’s probably true that people with well-paid and fulfilling careers gamble less than the rest of us, but that hardly makes it a “poor tax”.
I like to gamble on occasion, I like beer, I like many things that may not be good for me in a way that can be quantified. However, life is not a simple binary system of good/bad things. I find that the relaxation that comes from a beer or two with some good friends or the excitement of the minuscule but real possibility of winning the lottery gives me a level of enjoyment that is well worth the small “loss” of money that these things cost.
You don’t get it? Fine, I don’t get the attraction of team sports. But I’m way past feeling superior to the people who do.
I will buy two tickets, one QuickPick and one set of numbers I’ve kept since my first Lotto ticket, everytime the jackpot exceeds $100M. Since I am in CA, this happens maybe three times a year. Total annual investment: $6.
I usually pick up a Euromillions ticket when the jackpot hits stupid levels. There have been single winners north of £100 million, and that’s paid as a lump sum, tax free.
I bought one once, when the jackpot was at a silly level- used to work at a convenience store, and all the staff that day got one. Bit of fun.
I saw far too many people horribly overspend on them though- the one that depressed me most was the guy who came in the day of every draw, so 3 a week, if I remember, with his teenage daughter, and bought one ticket. Was very obvious daughter was worried about him, 'cos he didn’t have much money (she lived with her mum, but spent a few hours after school with her dad most days) and was trying to get him to stop wasting the little money he had, but okay, one ticket per lottery’s not too bad.
Then he’d come back in that night by himself and buy another 10. Every. Damn. Time.
Weirdly, one of the girls in the shop next door used to win constantly on the scratchcards- I mean, she’d buy about 4 a week, and at least 1 or 2 would win. She was also the only person who had ever won more than we could pay out from the shop. Kept waiting for the fluke run to end, and it kept not happening…
A world-wide lottery ticket with a jackpot, of say, one trillion dollars**** could probably wipe out hunger throughout the world by creating a lottery-based economy. Even the poorest of the poor would scrounge up enough resources to buy hope in a ticket.
