Given the fact that the remaining prizes were disclosed to the best of the lottery agency’s ability, I withdraw my support for this lawsuit.
Bet that’s got the plaintiff quaking in his boots.
By the way, welcome to the SDMB, gnome42! Your first post may have been in the Pit, but it was a good one 
It’s not where you post, it’s how you post - yours was a good one!
Regarding the “1 in Y” odds on scratchcards, I bought 5 of them for my brother’s birthday once. They all had odds of 1 in 5 or better, but not a single one won! Those things are a scam, I tell ya!
You keep saying this but that doesn’t make it so. I buy actual chances, not perceived chances.
As long as the winning ticket hasn’t been sold, I have a chance to go to any vendor in the state and I might get lucky. If it has been sold then the chance is 0.
Suggestions:
I might drop $2 on a chance to win $1000/wk for life. I won’t if someone already won it. I shouldn’t have to dig for that information. The fact that its on a website doesn’t help, because that destroys the ability to make a spontaneous purchase.
No, you don’t. You buy a winning ticket or a losing ticket. The “chance” involved is due to flaws in your (and everyone’s) perceptions: you’re unable to know whether you’re buying a winning ticket or a losing ticket.
When the winning ticket has been revealed, you now have the ability to gain some more information. It has no effect on the ticket you’re considering buying: its only effect is on your perception.
Tickets do not exist in some sort of Schrodiner’s Cat probabilistic state. Each ticket is either the winner or the loser; no ticket is 10% a winner or 0.000001% a winner or anything like that. For each ticket, the chance is 100% or 0%. It’s your perception of the odds that makes it seem different.
Daniel
The tickets are printed by the vendor as one single batch. They are shipped to the customer all at once. Some places have a single distribution point that supplies all the selling agents, other have multiple warehouses scattered all over the place that the shipments gets broken out and sent to.
Instant games are designed with a fixed total number of tickets, and a very specific prize structure for the game. The printed odds are simple math ( with rounding ) not estimates like with online games.
Those five were obviously funding the larger payouts.
For 1) By law the states have to supply the odds and payouts for a game. if they started printing the tickets with " top tier will pay something more than a free ticket, but we are not at liberty to tell you the exact amount" there would be even more lawsuits.
for 2) Those signs scroll the estimated Jackpot. this will be a minimum total payout to top prize winners. It will typically payout more. Since the top tier payout is based on a percentage of sales, and they do not know the true amount until sales are shut off for the draw, they guess. They will honor any guess they make though, so they tend to play this balancing act between marketing ( higher estimates ) and the bean counters ( lower estimates due to financial liability )
There is a direct relationship between sales and the advertised jackpot. For Powerball and Biggame ( small states/big states ) sales trend very evenly until the Jackpot exceeds about 150 -200 million any more.
What happens is that you buy the opportunity to purchase a winning ticket.
Wether that ticket is a winner or not is one thing, however, once the winning ticket has been sold to another person, there simply are no more opportunities to purchase that ticket.
You are buying an opportunity that no longer exists.
This is quite differant to a draw, where all the tickets are sold, and all have a value until the winning number is made public.
(and anyone who understands betting values knows that these are always very poor value bets)
Nobody actually sells a winning ticket, all they do is sell a chance in a final draw and until that has been done, every single ticket has an equal chance.When the winning announcement is made, every ticket except one becomes worthless.
In the scratch card scenario, every ticket sold after the winners is worthless, can you not see the qualitative differance?
(assuming no other smaller prizes)
As if I needed another reason to be embarrassed about my undergrad degree from that wonderful institution…
For scratch games, the option isn’t to buy a ticket or not, but to buy a ticket for game X or game Y. The expected values of the tickets should be more or less the same, so the choice shouldn’t matter, but in this case if the big prize for game X has been awarded the expected value of game Y would be bigger, so the informed purchaser would pick it. For the lower value prizes, we can expect that as they are won from the pool of already purchased tickets the expected values won’t change much.
Maybe the change in expected value from the big prize being won is tiny, so the suer would be awarded a penny or something. But, since many lottery sales agencies have links to the central office for pick 6, etc., it wouldn’t be too much trouble to put a display giving information about which big prize has already been awarded. Since most people are not buying tickets professionally,. but spur of the moment, saying that it is enough for the info to be hidden on some web site doesn’t quite hack it. A business trying this kind of thing might be quite reasonably sued.
You’re not thinking in four dimensions :).
A particular ticket is always in a particular spot. At a particular time, it will be purchased. You either have a 100% chance or a 0% chance to be the person to purchase that ticket. Before the winner is revealed, that’s how it works, but you don’t know which you’ll be, so your flawed perceptions require you to express things probablistically (sp?). After the winner is revealed, that’s how it works, but now you know which you are, so your improved perceptions allow you to say that you are or are not the winner.
All that’s changed is your information about the location of the winning ticket and the moment when it’s revealed. The change is in your knowledge.
You may, if you enjoy the thrill of ignorance (I don’t use the word disparagingly here), be sure to avoid finding out whether the game’s been won, in which case you will need to treat things as a probability (even though it’s actually a certainty). you may, if you would rather limit your damages, try to maximize your knowledge, in which case you will not play games where you can find out that you’re not the winner.
But it’s not up to the lottery to go way overboard to tell you when the winning ticket is sold. If you don’t like this kind of game, you’re free not to play it. Other folks do like it, and it’s not your business to stop them from playing.
Daniel
Done. Pay up.
Lets try an analogy.
An raffle. There are a fixed number of tickets sold.
An advertised number of tickets will be drawn to select the winning raffle tickets.
The method used is to throw the same number of markers into a giant concrete mixer, let it run for a while, and then dump out the required number of tickets to select the winners.
Now, because we don’t want to taint the proceedings, the number printed on the markers are not the same as on the raffle tickets. There is a one to one relationship between the raffle numbers and the markers. You can convert a raffle number into a unique marker number, but not the other way. So no one actually knows if they are a winner until they convert their raffle number into a marker number.
Now the method of choosing the winners is the exact same if the concrete mixer is fired up after all the tickets are sold, or weeks in advance. There is no difference in the randomness of the event.
Now if they do the selection ahead of time, to maintain fairness, the markers should be placed in trust, and whenever someone comes forward with a raffle ticket, you have a trusted third party convert the raffle number into a marker number, and see if it matches any of the drawn markers.
Instant games work exactly the same way. The lotteries just do not require the players to wait until the entire pool is sold to start comparing their raffle ticket to the entrusted markers.
You have the exact same chance of winning if you buy the first ticket sold, or the last.
You are playing Russian Roulette with a six shot revolver. The first though fourth player hear a click. The fifth person shoots himself dead. As the sixth player do you really think you now have the same chance to die as the previous five?
When you play lotto you don’t get to know the fate of the other players.
The fair way to run a contest like this (where people buy and check tickets at different times rather than a lottery where the ticket purchasers all learn at once if they won) is to distribute the prizes probablisticaly. For example, you print 1,000,000 tickets that have a 1 in a million chances of winning $75,000. Rather than print exactly one $75,000 ticket you should have a computer decide whether each ticket is a winner based on a 75/1000 chance. For any contest there may be zero, one, or more winners and knowing the results of previous scratch-offs would not give you any more information - even if you bought the last ticket and knew the results of all previous tickets.
This is not Lotto. Lotto is paramutual and the results are learned all at once.
A closer analogy would be there are X potential players of Russian Roulette. Each is in a sound proof room. To make it more interesting any surviving active player gets $5
One at a time a unique proctor will step into the room and hand a revolver to the player. The player has the option to pull the trigger or not. You do not get to know the fate of any previous player or how many players have chosen to play, only how long this game has been active. After active six players, the game is started again.
In one particular run player 2 gets the bullet. players 1 and 3-6 get the money. Do players 3-6 have better odds? No. The outcome was determined before hand. Player N was going to to lose. The next time it is player M. The key is that no person knows the value of N ahead of time or what the current state of the game is.
Those are called online games. only you don’t know the total number of tickets. Different style of game. If you play Pick 3 straight, you have 1 : 1000 chance of winning. It does not matter how many tickets are sold before or after yours.
For a lotto game, your ticket has say a 1:10 chance at winning $2. 1:20 of winning $4, up to 1:132 milllion of winning the top tier. The only effect other sales have is on the value of the top tier and what you portion of it is yours.
What I mean is that at the moment one buys a ticket one doesn’t know the fate or win/loss assignment of the other tickets.