The California Lottery (new page)

A few weeks ago on a slow day I was wondering what to do and thought I could stand to improve my coverage of the lottery. So, I thought I would emphasize on a particular state as an example. As the largest state, and where I'm from, California seemed the logical choice.

Little did I know at the time that California has a unique rule that every game must be pari-mutual in nature. In other words, the state can never have an interest in the outcome. That made my job harder. I had to carefully go through California Lottery regulations to get at how they calculate wins. Between the probabilities and the regulations, in most cases I could get after average wins.

Enough introduction. Please check out my new 3,600-word page on the California Lottery. As always, I welcome questions, comments, and especially corrections.

The question for the poll is do you play the lottery when in California?

In a lot of the tables, the "catch" column is right-justifying numbers but left-justifying text. This looks confusing.

I assume the "combinations" column in the SuperLotto Plus Prize Allocation table should be "Mega Ball".

In Daily Derby, the three-digit number is not the time that the race starts; it's the last three digits of the running time of the race (which is always between 1:40.00 and 1:49.99).

Hot Spot is played from 6 AM to 2 AM, according to the lottery home page.

Quote: ThatDonGuy

In a lot of the tables, the "catch" column is right-justifying numbers but left-justifying text. This looks confusing.

Thanks for your corrections. That alignment issue is a convention/problem I have with lots of pages. Usually my tables have text in the left column, which I will left align. However, to be consistent, I like to align all text to the left. This goes back to how we did things when I wrote reports for Social Security. In this case, I changed the alignment of the Mega Ball column to centered. It may be inconsistent with other tables, but does look better.

Thanks again.

Didn't see my vote choice.
Cali gonna fall into the Pacific.
Pre-sale oceanfront bargains available in Arizona.

Oh, the Lottery in California-I-eh.
It's a lottery.
Damn bandits already got me playing BJ.

OK, if I happen to find myself in California, while there still is a California, I will try to drop a couple bucks on their lottery. Can I just walk into a convenience store and ask for a lottery ticket? Can I ask that in English?
Well sort-of southern US almost English? Is their a special California lottery language? Sumtin' like gimme two, block one, and another full bore? Or however that translates into semi-Spanish? No doubt the California Lottery will survive without me, just the same amount of time California survives without me, which may not be long....

Quote: TwoFeathersATL

Didn't see my vote choice.
Cali gonna fall into the Pacific.
Pre-sale oceanfront bargains available in Arizona.

Oh, the Lottery in California-I-eh.
It's a lottery.
Damn bandits already got me playing BJ.

OK, if I happen to find myself in California, while there still is a California, I will try to drop a couple bucks on their lottery. Can I just walk into a convenience store and ask for a lottery ticket? Can I ask that in English?
Well sort-of southern US almost English? Is their a special California lottery language? Sumtin' like gimme two, block one, and another full bore? Or however that translates into semi-Spanish? No doubt the California Lottery will survive without me, just the same amount of time California survives without me, which may not be long....

Are you doing your own circle thingy that EB was talking about in another thread?

Forget it, the silly polls at the tops of a lot of pages are just asking for it.