At the Hilton casino in Laughlin, NV my dad picked up a brochure entitled ‘How To Win $100,000 Playing Keno’. He followed the advice in the pamphlet and won $100,000 on his first game. It was also his last game, as he pocketed his winnings and didn’t gamble the rest of the weekend.
In short, it improves expected value, which is generally a good thing to do. But of course in essentially every known lottery, expected value is always unfavorable, and cannot be made even close to attractive by any number-choosing scheme.
I don’t believe they would invalidate it. How COULD they invalidate it without casting the whole lottery system into doubt? Your example IS one of the possible combinations so they would have to let it ride if they wanted anyone to bet in their lottery any more.
And as an aside, I heard that many, many people (I think I remember “10,000” as the number) bet the 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 sequence every lottery. So if that number DID win the jackpot, each person would only get a (relative) pittance.
J.
Precisely so. Scatter? Scat means dung, the scat of a bull is bullshit, and so a scatter is a bullshitter.
A few of the minor rules in the lottery books seem plausible enough, but in practice, they amount to scat. These are the rules about having to share a win with several other players. The rule says if you play your kids’ birth dates, or the letters of their names, you’ll hit with other parents of kids born on the same day. True? No. Every lottery publishes lists of past winners. Ever see a jackpot with half a dozen winners? No.
Most players, and so most winners, let the computer pick their numbers.
Fran Liebowitz said the odds of winning the lottery are the same whether you play or not. Statistically, she’s very nearly correct.
You might be interested in this result in the UK national lottery: 57 jackpot winners. The winning numbers fit perfectly into a ‘kids ages, our ages, etc’ method of choosing numbers: 2, 12, 19, 28, 38, 48.
However, perhaps more significant is the way somebody picking numbers ‘at random’ when marking them by hand could easily end up choosing ones more or less in a line, such as 19, 28, 38 and 48…
Keep in mind that a lot of lottery prizes are pari-mutual besides the top lottery prizes. E.g., my state has a 5 number pick where the winners with 3, 4 or 5 numbers share the pools.