Guy follows this strategy, wins $100,000 smackers. The strategy was outlined in an episode of “Lottery change my life”. To wit: play 25$ a week for 3 months. What F’d up strategy is that? Was there something more to it on the TV show? Why not $20 per week or $50? Why not 4 months? That is the simplest thing I have ever seen that was called a lottery “strategy”.
I have no idea why the text is formatted like that.
How about all the others(of which I’m sure there are plenty) who followed the “strategy” and didn’t win a thing?
I don’t know why the dollar sign caused that but here it is with the dollar sign nullified as a special character.
Guy follows this strategy, wins $100,000 smackers. The strategy was outlined in an episode of “Lottery change my life”. To wit: play 25$ a week for 3 months. What F’d up strategy is that? Was there something more to it on the TV show? Why not $20 per week or $50? Why not 4 months? That is the simplest thing I have ever seen that was called a lottery “strategy”.
https://www.cnn.com/2022/06/25/us/south-carolina-lottery-winner-tv-show-trnd/index.html
It’s no worse (or better) than any other lottery strategy that involves the same amount of money, so I don’t see a problem with it.
The news is always going to feature confirmation bias. All those people who live to 100 and say the secret is < something a lot of people who don’t live to 100 also do > aren’t going to have secret knowledge or anything.
It’s just going to happen to work for them and not for others. Same as the lottery.
I don’t even understand why this ran as a story. He just got lucky —- like every other lottery winner. There’s nothing else to this. This is not a “strategy” — it’s a budget at best.
Well, my strategy has always been to spend $0 /week on the lottery, and I’m doing better than 99% of people who don’t use my strategy. Maybe CNN will do a story on me.
One “typical” strategy is to wait until the jackpot has a sufficiently large expected value, then buy every possible combination. Supposedly Stefan Mandel did this over a dozen times.
In the case of Powerball, there are 292,201,338 possible combinations, so at $2 a play you’d be out about $600 million in order to buy one of every possible ticket. I don’t think there’s been a Powerball draw yet where you’d be guaranteed a profit after taxes, and that’s even assuming you could physically buy that many tickets in time for the draw - you’d need to fill out about 60 million playslips (five plays per slip) and have operators feed them through ticket machines one by one, and all the labor involved in that would probably take a cut out of your revenues as well.
It’s doubtful that situation has ever happened.
There are a couple major issues (assuming you can actually buy all possible combinations in the first place - this has actually never happened, though some have tried).
One is multiple winners. People who try to consider a ‘sufficiently large expected value’ usually assume they won’t be splitting the jackpot with anybody else. But once there are enough players (and a large jackpot usually has more people playing than usual), you have to take the possibility of a split jackpot into consideration and the expectation stays definitively negative.
Another is people tend to look at the headline number without considering the jackpot is split over 30 years and does not include taxes (in the case of US lotteries, anyway). If you take a lump sum, you aren’t getting that amount. And if you take it over 30 years, the future value decreases by whatever inflation does to it. In both cases, taxes take a chunk out of it. Either way, the expected value is generally decreased a considerable amount.
Basically, even people who have tried to use math to improve their expected value usually miss some things and end up relying on luck much more than they realize.
I have a 100% guaranteed method of making money out of a lottery.
Be the company running the lottery. 
Markdown interpreted the dollar signs as indicating TeX. I’ve fixed it.
Oh, and why it happened, you had one whitespace-dollarsign-othercharacter, and then later had othercharacter-dollarsign-whitespace. If you had written “25$” as “$25”, it would have looked as intended.
Speaking of lotteries, how does the Mega Millions get away with the false advertising? The current estimated jackpot is a mere $328 million. That’s not a mega million. Minimum jackpot should be $1 billion.
A mega blowout sale has nothing to do with a billion flat tires.
So there.
There was no part of his stated strategy that made him more likely to win. That is really poor journalism.
Sorta. The guy used the “strategy”. He did win. The statement that “South Carolina man wins $100,000 lottery after using strategy he saw on TV” is totally accurate.
The mistake is entirely in article readers conflating “after” with “because”. Post hoc ergo prompter hoc is an official logical fallacy for a reason. “after” does NOT mean “because” and never has.
1 Trillion, actually. Unless you are British.
I have a 100% fool proof guaranteed way to make a small fortune playing the lottery.
Start with a big fortune.
Here is a couple that figured out a winning strategy.
My lottery strategy is pick sequential numbers because nobody else picks sequential numbers so if you do win you’ll be the only one who bet on it.
Maybe I shouldn’t be telling you guys this.