Are state lotteries exploitable?

An interesting article in Wired.
One quote I found particularly curious (this refers to reports by Massachusetts state auditor):

Quote: Wired

The reports describe a long list of troubling findings, such as the fact that one person cashed in 1,588 winning tickets between 2002 and 2004 for a grand total of $2.84 million.

Interesting, but from what I have seen you would have to pull the winners acting as the employee who sells them. A customer does not see in advance the next card to be sold. You could sure add to your hourly wage.

A couple of weeks ago on Fox News they ahd someone talking about how to improve your chances playing the lottery. I recall two things. One which actually amde sense:

1) He recommended buying the same lotto numbers each week, rather than different numbers or quick picks. I see no advantage to that, as all numbers are equally likely to win (and to lose).

2) This actually makes sense. The guy said to buy only one type of scratch-off or pull-tab ticket, and to do so for games that haven't sold the winning ticket yet (and pressumably there is a way to check that). The sense is that these are different games, so buying only one game where the big winners are still to eb sold, your chances fo a big winner are higher, or should be.

For point 1 there is a distinct disadvantage. If you miss playing them one week and one of them hits, you'll want to jump off a bridge.

Eons ago some chain of gas stations distributed these Half-Bills with every purchase. If you got a matching half, you won that amount. Simple.
Of course they printed up tons of one half and darn few of the profitable half for each denomination. Yet what happened is the gas station owner would call in his favorite customers and hand out the envelopes to them in a hat to be passed around. It was clear from the manner in which they were mailed which the valuable ones were.

Now I guess a lottery has better security or tries to, but I'm sure someone could track the shipping and mixing. Massachusetts was the scene of alot of thefts of credit cards being sent by air freight. Knowing the contents of the valuable shipments is often easy.

Quote: Nareed

For point 1 there is a distinct disadvantage. If you miss playing them one week and one of them hits, you'll want to jump off a bridge.

Hey! We already have a thread for that....

Quote: Nareed

1) He recommended buying the same lotto numbers each week, rather than different numbers or quick picks. I see no advantage to that, as all numbers are equally likely to win (and to lose).

I think this has been discussed other places here, but this can make sense in some specific circumstances. Many people who pick their own numbers select them based on important dates, and their numbers will always be below 31. To the extent that the machine could randomly assign you 5 (or 6) numbers below 31, you're better off playing your own set of numbers that are all above 31. Your EV will be higher with numbers that are all above 31, since your odds of tying for the win will be reduced.

Quote: DJTeddyBear

Hey! We already have a thread for that....

I'm aware. This as malicious as I get when posting. Aren't you relieved to know this? ;)

Quote: dm

Interesting, but from what I have seen you would have to pull the winners acting as the employee who sells them. A customer does not see in advance the next card to be sold. You could sure add to your hourly wage.

The guy in the article says that he asked several stores if he could buy a bunch of tickets, take them home, and then bring back unused ones, and everybody said it was fine as long as they were unscratched.

Quote: rdw4potus

Your EV will be higher with numbers that are all above 31, since your odds of tying for the win will be reduced.

Granted. But your odds of winning are the same. Unless there is a bias in the way the drawings are held.

Quote: Nareed

A couple of weeks ago on Fox News they ahd someone talking about how to improve your chances playing the lottery. I recall two things. One which actually amde sense:

1) He recommended buying the same lotto numbers each week, rather than different numbers or quick picks. I see no advantage to that, as all numbers are equally likely to win (and to lose).

2) This actually makes sense. The guy said to buy only one type of scratch-off or pull-tab ticket, and to do so for games that haven't sold the winning ticket yet (and pressumably there is a way to check that). The sense is that these are different games, so buying only one game where the big winners are still to eb sold, your chances fo a big winner are higher, or should be.

For point 1 there is a distinct disadvantage. If you miss playing them one week and one of them hits, you'll want to jump off a bridge.

One additional advantage is that if you only play one type of scratch-off ticket, you will accumulate the minimum amount needed to enter the second chance drawings associated with that particular game faster, and will have more overall second chance entries than if you played a wide variety of scratch-off games.

Quote: weaselman

An interesting article in Wired.
One quote I found particularly curious (this refers to reports by Massachusetts state auditor):

Quote: Wired

The reports describe a long list of troubling findings, such as the fact that one person cashed in 1,588 winning tickets between 2002 and 2004 for a grand total of $2.84 million.

There is a drawing-type lottery game in Mass which becomes exploitable (in my opinion) approximately once every 2 months. However, that particular game wasn't introduced until 2004, so that can't be what that guy was playing.

Quote: weaselman

The guy in the article says that he asked several stores if he could buy a bunch of tickets, take them home, and then bring back unused ones, and everybody said it was fine as long as they were unscratched.

I don't believe it to be a normal practice, or even more than very remote.

The government of Ontario cracked down on lottery operators. Take this story: In 2003, a group of 7 bought a Super-7 ticket. They won a free ticket but when they went to cash it, the operator said that it didn't win. The operator kept the free ticket to himself and won $12.5 million. OLG came up with new technology to identify the original owner of the ticket and the group just collected $14.85 million last week.

This story illustrated that of 5,713 major Ontario lottery wins of $50K or more, 3.5 percent were won by people who worked in stores selling lottery tickets. A survey showed that the average lottery seller sells about 1.5x as much as an average adult.

As a result of this, the expected number of major wins should be 57. The probability of winning 200 or more major prizes by sellers would be less then 1 in 7 billion. It was clear that lottery sellers were winning significantly more major lottery prizes than could be accounted for by chance alone. The statistics proved the existence of widespread lottery fraud. The OLG webpage later admitted that 53 per cent of the recorded insider wins were specifically from sellers at convenience stores. This large number of convenience store wins could not have arisen purely by chance.

In honor of the departed and sorely missed FRGambler I am performing a resurrection:

This ancient thread is being revived to show some recent journalistic-investigations into the Florida lottery.

Basically some curious reporters wanted to find out if anyone was scamming the lottery and their statistical analysis failed to show that the lottery was being scammed but did reveal that lottery winners appeared likely to get scammed. An entire network of scammers and ticket brokers appears to exist.

Some of the problem is based on winners who fear collecting their money directly due to child support issues or citizenship issues. Most of the scamming appears to be based on people who give tickets to clerks to determine if they are winners. The clerks routinely report to the consumer that the ticket was a loser and then take the accumulated winning tickets to a broker who claims the money rather than having the lottery vendor be the winner. Of course the broker uses some innocent victims identity and that person gets stuck with thousands in tax liability.

Pacific Standard .

The simple solution to end clerk scamming is for the machines to make a victory beeping noise on winning tickets.

Yes, that would surely work. The stores provide bar code readers but only show a visual Not A Winner response .

Some tickets are complex scratchoffs.

The journalists tried to see if the lottery itself was being scammed but the journalists were only able to find that suspicious activity involving lottery winners.

Lotteries are dinosaurs and need reform and updating to survive the 21st century. Their typical response is usually business as usual, denial and pretending its working to keep all the cogs and the status quo.
It needs to go online and set up so 100% of winners get paid and not be used as a collection agency, corporate welfare office, and redistribution for tax cuts and pet projects. Let the lottery do its job making the edge and that's it.

This thread just jogged my memory. When I got home Tuesday I headed to the bar, it's called That Bar in downtown Great Falls and is my home watering hole. While I was gone they had installed a Lotto machine in the bar. There are only two in all of downtown. So the talk around the bar was about a Shake-A-Day progressive and it was up to $2160. I looked up at the chalk board behind the bar and it said shake a day was at $99, a total sucker bet. What I didn't know was the Montana Lottery had a game called shake a day also.

So I got to asking them about the game. I went to this damn lotto machine and punched up the game. It said a shake a day ticket costs $3....and it listed the odds involved. The game is played with five virtual dice.

Full House pays $3 and the chances are 1 in 3.
Four of a Kind pays $50 and the chances are 1 in 56
Five of a Kinds pays the progressive which starts at $1000 and goes up with each ticket bought until it is hit. The chances are 1 in 5000.

So I did the math and, as long as everything is random, the average cost is $5550 to produce a Five of a Kind. I did all this analyzing while drunk on Black Velvet and told myself I would do some further investigating when I sobered up. So I stumbled across this thread today and it jogged my memory. I did some googling around and found where it was recently hit for $8200.

I don't have any experience with lotteries. But, unless I'm missing something, I may have found a new gambling game.