Princeton Grads Bag Over $6 Million In Lottery Wins

Any thought on this ?

https://patch.com/new-jersey/princeton/amp/29107775/princeton-grads-bag-over-6-million-in-lottery-wins-reports

Thread started on November 30th

This Indiana Lottery page has a link to scratch-off ticket stats:

https://hoosierlottery.com/games/scratch-off

The link is labeled “VIEW SCRATCH-OFF STATS”.

The target page is no longer available. Hmmm...

Edit: Tried unsuccessfully to use the link markup. Haven’t got the time to troubleshoot the problem.

I did look at this about a year ago. Without some non-public information, it's hard to be profitable for very much, and taxes/etc and the obvious extreme variance associated with a game that has a 5M first prize seems really difficult to beat.

The big winning tickets aren't distributed at random and all the tickets are serialized, but in general it struck me as a pretty risky, marginal bet. Most likely they know or predict with high confidence the batch that it will be in and only purchase the tickets to expedite new shipments. No doubt the lottery supplier is already aware, if the newspaper is, and are currently weighing their options.

The results don't appear to be a particular outlier to me, spending north of two million and hitting one big ticket, but who's to say without more accurate information?

The article that you cite does not mention rolldowns:
https://www.maa.org/meetings/calendar-events/how-to-get-rich-playing-the-lottery
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/jerry-and-marge-selbee-how-a-retired-couple-won-millions-using-a-lottery-loophole-60-minutes/

If enough teams jump on a rolldown, the edge has to go away.