Is the distribution of instant lottery tickets purely random?

Factual Questions
1

In essence this is really a question about how winning tickets are generated during the manufacturing process.

I assume that the process is random in the broadest sense. But since purely random assignment would mean that you could get significant clusters of winning tickets, I wonder if there isn’t some logic built into the computers that do the actual assignment to help smooth out any clumpiness.

For example, with a purely random assignment, you might get several tickets in a row that win significant prizes. For this example I’ll assume any prize that is more than double the ticket price is significant. Since one of the ways they encourage people to play the instant games is by having lots of small prizes such that if you play regularly you will get some portion of your money back. If you have very long runs of tickets with no prizes, then you end up discouraging players.

So ideally you want to have a distribution of winning tickets of all amounts that doesn’t demonstrate a high level of clustering. While the people who buy into such a cluster are very happy, it necessarily means that other players are seeing long runs of losing tickets.

So it would seem that there is a strong incentive to make the distribution of winning tickets at any given point in time be random in addition to having a random distribution overall. What I’m trying to say is that if there are 10 top level prizes for a particular game, ideally, you would want to see 1 prize claimed after 1/10th of the tickets were sold, 2 after 2/10th’s, etc. Except that your goal would really be to see this kind of time dependent distribution for all prize levels to some extent so as to encourage as many players as possible for the longest amount of time.

I do understand from the point of view of the math that there is no point in trying to massage the distribution as it relates to time. It is irrelevant. But the question is not one of math. I’m sure the companies that make the tickets know about random number generators. My question is do they do any filtering to either eliminate or at least smooth out any clumping of winning or losing tickets that you would get from a purely random process.

Obviously this would have to be encoded in the manufacturing system since you couldn’t trust humans with that sort of knowledge. Further, knowledge of the code shouldn’t give you an advantage since all it really tells you is that you won’t get many consecutive winners - or at least not as many as you would under normal probabilistic circumstances.

My guess is that it is probably illegal to do anything like this, but since the lotteries are state operated and the laws are state enforced, it’s not beyond the realm of possibility that some effort is made to create ideal distributions for the state’s benefit.

If done properly, it shouldn’t be at all obvious since rolls of tickets get sold at varying rates by a variety of vendors. So even if one were to build in this time dependent randomness, wouldn’t it be difficult to detect if the only data you could use to test the hypothesis were the purchase dates of winning tickets? That I’m not sure about. Not to go off on a tangent, but it seems to me that there might be ways you could “back into” what the time-based distribution would have been.

2

In Massachusetts it couldn’t work this way. Stores overstock books of tickets, and pay for them only once their activated. They don’t need to be activated in any order, and a store could easily have a 6 month supply of a particular game.

If they distributed tickets this way, once a top level prize was won, buyers would be smart to stop buying for a while(They’d be smarter to not buy any at all).

Of course, none of this stops gambling addicts from thinking they have a system. Some think that a book of tickets is hot when there are big winners. Others won’t buy if there has already been a big winner. Still others think that the number of the ticket matters.

3

Bringing up a very old post but, nonetheless, one that is timely now that the holiday season - and credit card bills - are upon us once again.

I would say that those instant lottery tickets are not random. Whenever humans come in contact with a contest or game there exists a chance for manipulation in some way. When you ponder the “assembly line” of human contact that occurs, if you will, from the point of manufacture to the removal from factory to loading onto trucks and, finally, to the insertion of instant tickets into machines or onto retailers’ shelves you have multiple opportunities for human interference.

And that is only on a lesser level. The government has an interest in the lottery as well as purchasers of the tickets (and the senior citizens who suppposedly benefit from the sales of said tickets in some states):

It would seem logical to me that ticket distribution is far from random. For a town or city that is “underfunded,” what better way to get a piece of Uncle Sam’s pie than to plant some winning tickets into those instant lottery machines and onto store shelves? Since many poorer areas boast the highest sales of instant lottery tickets it seems plausible that the tickets would not go unsold for long.

Another example of human interference in the olanning, manufacture and distribution of lottery tickets takes place before the paper meets the ink: Demographics once again plays a role. Think about those “Win $XXXX For Life” tickets. Do you think the majority of those tickets are going to get planted in an area where yuppies or young, growing families reside or do you think they’ll somehow end up in areas inhabited by mostly older, retired residents?

In the end, the instant lottery’s design, distribution and strategy might be described as logical, pragmatic and, as in everything else, economically-based. Just don’t call it “random,” because it’s not.

4

Do you have anything remotely like a cite for this, or are you just pulling it out of your ass?

5

I know that in Australia with certain lotteries, the lotto ticket number is not randomly generated.

For example in the rules of a lottery named “Lucky” it states that unless you pick your own, the ticket machine simply issues the “next chronological number” from the last - I presume the ticket machine logs into the server of NSW Lotteries to do this. It never states where it generates the number from and what it is incremented by - I’ve never bought a ticket myself and I assume that regular players do not purchase blocks of sequential numbers.

Requesting a randomly generated number/lots of provides also presumably is spat out by a random number algorithm that the main server has, and like all random number generators that have been programmed to this day is not truly random to begin with. It may also take inputs such as the ticket machine requesting the number as the seed to generate the random number from so that two machines happening to request numbers at the same instance don’t give two customers identical tickets.

At any rate, considering that the NSW Lottery at least awards ticket sellers with plaques stating that the x division prize has been won at this place, regardless of whether the distribution is randomised they are implying that it is somehow dependent on the location of your ticket purchase.

After all is said and done though, you are forgetting that players do NOT want “as many prizes to be awarded as possible” since they are getting a division of the prize pool (jackpot). They want to be the one person who wins it all, and doesn’t mind being the loser in the interim. The frequency and amount of wins are only indicated to players by intervals between withdrawal of the jackpot amount (eg a 30 million weekly lottery after 8 weeks is advertised as a 2 million, implying someone(s) won the previous 30 mil by participating in it 8 times this jackpot run), not through any actual issuing of tickets. So any “probability fixing” by the state government would not be through any ordering of tickets or change in system of generating the winning numbers, but simply by withdrawing from the prize pool, whether it was a legitimate win or not.

6

I read someplace that in at least one state, the rolls of scratch-off tickets are guaranteed to have some minimum number X winners in each roll.

Convenience store clerks take advantage of this by watching and counting how many winners they sell (most customers scratch off right then and there and redeem their winners before leaving the store), and just like card counting, the clerks can know when it’s a good time to buy the last few tickets from a roll.

*** Ponder

7

Not only are the scratch tickets not random, there has been documentation of how to figure out which tickets are winners, and evidence that some people have taken advantage of this for a very long time. See the article in Wired magazine from earlier this year called “Cracking the Scratch Lottery Code” for details.

8

I had a friend in grade school whose father was a computer programmer for the state lottery. He managed the department that wrote code to randomize all the scratcher’s tickets. I guarantee they do not steer winning tickets to different areas based on demographics or anything else; that is against the law. They do, however, change the ways in which different games are randomized. As has been mentioned, no computer random number generator is entirely random. There will always be a pattern. Because of this different games are all programmed to use random numbers in different ways so any potential patterns will not follow from one game to another. Once the final code is put together, manufacturing is all automated and no one knows which tickets are winners or where they are going.

9

This is the fatal flaw IMO in this plan. I have sold Florida Lottery instant tickets for literally half my life, and not one of the places I have ever worked would permit the return of unused tickets. In addition, the second scheme would get noticed very quickly – most of my Lotto customers know how the tickets are numbered and know that they are sold strictly in sequence, and they would notice right away that I’m selling tickets out of order.

As far as distribution, I have no reason to believe it’s anything but as random as possible. Overall odds of winning any prize are printed on the reverse of each ticket, and the tickets themselves all come from the same warehouse to every Lottery retailer in the state when ordered. They are not directed or labeled in any way specific to any area or retailer, and they are utterly identical at every retailer.
As an aside, the reason for signage saying A $231,657 FANTASY 5 WINNING TICKET WAS SOLD HERE! is that in many players’ perceptions, that means there will be another winning ticket sold at the same retailer. I cannot tell you how much utterly irrational behavior I have witnessed surrounding Lotto in the last 16 years.

10

Maybe Florida scratch tickets worth differently, but in Canada I’ve usually seen display cases where you pick the particular ticket you want.

Here’s a picture showing what I mean.

11

Is it a requirement that they be sold in order? I had no such requirements, and I don’t recall very many people actually checking the numbers anyway.

When I worked in a convenience store, the scratch tickets on display were in the counter. The counter surface was glass so you could see what was currently available, but the tickets had to be taken out by the cashier and weren’t accessible from the front.

When I stocked it up I would put 4-5 of the same one, with them overlapping, and therefore the lowest number in the sequence would be underneath. When I sold them, I’d take from the top, and then later restock it, leaving the same ones at the bottom. So right there there would be huge gaps in the sequence.

When I sold out of a particular kind, I’d just put more of whatever in that spot, or maybe rearrange some other ones, further shuffling the stacks.

Occasionally I would drop a whole bunch and they’d get mixed up that way. And sometimes people would pick their own ticket, because it felt luckier.

So in the stores I worked at, having gaps or tickets out of order wouldn’t really raise any flags. In any case, you could just note the winning ones, wait until they’re close to being sold, and then buy them up, preserving the order. Probably you’re more likely to get caught if you redeem them at your own store, and only redeem winners. Better buy a few losers as well, and maybe get a friend to cash them in, across town somewhere.

12

In Florida, they come in books ranging from 50 to 300 tickets pre-perforated but attached to each other. The retailer loads the books into a counter-top dispenser (and a vending machine, if there is one) and sells them strictly in order, one at a time, by pulling them off the end of the book.

At my location (and everywhere I’ve worked), we sell so many that to do it the ways you and hogarth each describe would be utterly unworkable. Where I work now is a relatively low-volume Lotto location and we sell around $12-1500 worth daily of instant tickets.

13

In the very early days of Canadian lotteries (Early 70’s when they were first allowed to pay for the Montreal Olympics) The tickets were preprinted and sold in booklets; someone pointed out how unrandom the sorting process was, by matching up the printing pattern on the perforations. “Random” apparently consisted of hand-shuffling handfuls of tickets at a time in a box. A retailer could assemble the sequence of the box and pick out the free plays and possible winners.

Another interesting story was about the people who worked for the company that produced the McDonald’s “Monopoly” tickets. Someone whose job it was to insert the big winners randomly into the ticket stream instead held onto a few, gave them to friends around the country and had them cash in. He was caught because among other things, the distribution pattern of big winners was considered very unusual statistically.

Recently, Canadian lotteries have been hit by a more mundane scandal - people too lazy to check their tickets ask the clerk to scan it. The store clerk scans it, says “no winner” and hands back a different ticket. On a TV program a year or two ago, a stats prof pointed out that the proportion of lottery winners (especially big winners) who are lottery ticket vendors is so high it cannot be explained by random luck. Several “winners” have been charged in Ontario. You can now lose your license for scanning a ticket that has not been signed; I’m sure they have secret shoppers to check compliance.

I know of charities that have the break-open tickets for sale (i.e. at their bingo games). You buy a box i.e. of 1,000 with so many of each winner (80% payout). They have been warned after several were caught “card-counting”. Some would simply stop selling when the prizes left exceeded the ticket sales to be generated, if the big prizes had not been cashed. In other cases, they would break open the tickets themselves and claim they were sold. (Or greedy volunteers would do the task for profit). It works the other way too, they were careful not to tell anyone “the big win has already been claimed”.

Most BIG lotteries have computer-generated numbers or use the bingo-ball system; the winners are pulled afterwards. Yes, most of the big winners seem to be older people, but that goes for the type of person buying tickets, and even for the type of person you see in casinos. There is no way to game the system that I have heard. Canadian tickets are randomly generated by computer terminals unless you ask for your favourite numbers, and include a bar-code that indicates the vendor and time of sale. The system knows when the winning numbers are generated if there is a winner and how many. (System is similar for USA Powerball etc.) Nubers are picked by using bingo balls - even used to be live on TV. That’s pretty hard to fix unless the whole establishment is in on it.

There’s a funny Canadian movie “Highway 61” where the devil is chasing some people down to New Orleans. When he runs low on cash, he stops in at a church bingo and wins all the prizes. Someone says as he’s leaving, “You cheated!”
He turns to her and says “Lady, you can’t cheat at bingo. If I could cheat, I would. But you can’t cheat at bingo.”

(There was a fellow a few years ago who showed how the Keno in a Montreal Casino was flawed by winning a massive payout. It ended up in court; I don’t recall hearing the final outcome. Rumour has it the casino employees knew of and milked the system for months and he wrecked it for them… basically, the “random” number sequence repeated when the computer was rebooted. Unlike other casinos, Montreal turned it off every night.)

The Wired article basically focusses on computer-generated scratch cards. The more complex you make a card, the more likely the computer generated random will have a flaw. Just because someone ended up being head programmer for some ticket-printing company does not mean they were a statistical genius at random; and what are the odds that an audit company includes statitical creative geniuses either? Basically, the more complex the card, the more likely that something was missed -w hich was the point for the article.

14

You were right to post this article. The point of it, as someone incorrectly stated, was not that the more complex the greater the flaw, but rather using visible clues on scratch card games reveals the flaw or pattern. This is particular to and only proven with tic tac toe scratch card games.

The secret, and the most valuable information to carry with you, is that when playing a tic tac toe game you must look for a number that is a singleton (i.e. not repeated anywhere else on the card), these will be winners 90% of the time.
Of course the lottery isn’t random. There must be a controlled amount of winners, a controlled distribution, and a controlled code. How can a thing be controlled and random simultaneously? That’s quite the anomaly.

This is old but whatever.

15

Lotteries are strange beasts.

A few years ago a national charity arranged to put a car up as a prize. The plan was to sell tickets at events all over the country. I don’t remember the exact details but they had calculated that the odds were very long for any given ticket, so they would make a huge profit. Unfortunately, the car was won at the second event.

There was a case where a newspaper was giving away some large prize to random buyers each week. They got into big trouble when it came out that they tried to ensure that the winners were spread across the country.

16

Just tossing in a nice anecdote, there is this classic (bad unfortunately, bad when it comes to audio quality) Australian video.

Summary of the story: Australian guy down on his luck buys an instant lottery ticket and wins a car. Local TV station wants to make a story out of this and re-enact the event, sending him to the shop where he bought the winning ticket and filming him buying a ticket. And lo behold, the ticket he bought for the re-renacting wins him a quarter million, in front of running cameras.

17

Wow I for some reason still felt bad for this guy even after he won the second time, miserable old fellow really. Thanks for the share, made my night, and pardon the necro for a first post!

18

Depends. I know of a work pool that won the Lotto 649; Canadian lottery, prizes in the millions. It’s a random number (bingo ball) draw, and one option is a totally random “quick pick” ticket generated by the terminal on the fly.

So you’d expect these guys to be rich? No, there were more than half a dozen winners (which was unusual, typically one or two winning tickets). So the ten pool members split $300,000 instead of a few million.

Random number draws are just that - random.

19

I think the OP was asking about scratch and win tickets where the ticket is a winner or a loser as soon as it’s printed.

20

The OP was also asking a few years ago.