Blue Mass Group

Reality-based commentary on politics.

How to break the lottery

By

Here’s an interesting article about a guy who broke the scratch-ticket lottery in Toronto.

Essentially the weakness is that the lottery must control how much is pays out, which makes the game not random. In addition, the tickets are designed to entice the scratcher by offering clues and near misses.

Put together, a mathematician working in geology was able to figure out how to use this to break the game. There are even examples of strange streaks for winners. The implication is that some proportion of the winning is engineered outside the legal-appearing veneer on the games, which if true may be the worst thing for state lotteries.

http://www.wired.com/magazine/…

Please share widely!
fb-share-icon
Tweet
0

Comments

  1. From a local standpoint, this passage was rather notable:

    <

    p>

    Consider a series of reports by the Massachusetts state auditor. 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. (The report does not provide the name of the lucky winner.) A 1999 audit found that another person cashed in 149 tickets worth $237,000, while the top 10 multiple-prize winners had won 842 times for a total of $1.8 million. Since only six out of every 100,000 tickets yield a prize between $1,000 and $5,000, the auditor dryly observed that these “fortunate” players would have needed to buy “hundreds of thousands to millions of tickets.” (The report also noted that the auditor’s team found that full and partial ticket books were being abandoned at lottery headquarters in plastic bags.)

    <

    p>Given that Massachusetts is home to many mathematically inclined products of MIT and other such schools, the same ones who famously pioneered hyper-accurate card counting as dramatized in the movie Twenty-One, I find it unlikely this is coincidence.  The larger lesson seems to be that any system thought up by a person can also be exploited by a person.

    <

    p>And now I have another reason not to play scratch games — the winning tickets may already have been excised from the available pile.

    • This “lucky winner” alluded to is more a professional “winning ticket claimer”.  For a percentage, they’ll claim your winning ticket and you get cash (and no tax reporting).  Meantime they’re hoarding losing tickets to negate their “winnings”.  A loss to the Commonwealth as the original winner doesn’t pay any taxes, and the “claimer” pretty much negates their reported winnings by picking up losing tickets.

      <

      p>Somewhat analogous to those feel good stories about those “dedicated Red Sox fans” from Hartford with no job in the front of the line buying up tens of thousands of dollars of tickets (they ain’t dedicated, and their cash is from a scalper, not their rent and food money).

      • The “ticket cashier” issue is mentioned in that same article.  Whether the claimant is the same person or not, someone is removing winning tickets from the pile wherein the tickets I could buy are located.  (Not sure where I talked of the lucky winner, that was a quote from the original article).

  2. Thanks. Very interesting article. I haven’t bought a lottery ticket since the original Megabucks, and never bought a scratch ticket, so I don’t know much about odds and payouts. But, any game like this uses a relatively small set of numbers and computers can only generate pseudorandom numbers, so some pattern is likely to exist.

    <

    p>The Massachusetts examples were interesting, they are  good example of high probability/low payout adding up. Could be a group that’s figured out how to tip the odds in their favor, like the guy in the article.  Or someone cashing other people’s tickets, as the article also alluded to. Either way, somebody scratched a lot of tickets.

    <

    p>The Texas woman is the fascinating story. An example of low probability/high payout. She won the big payout in four games over 17 years, seemingly without buying many tickets. And two of the four winners at the same store. Again, without knowing a lot more about the payouts/odds on the games it’s hard to tell if she’s just damn lucky of something else is going on.

    <

    p>But, a mysterious math genius living in Las Vegas who periodically shows up in a small town in Texas and buys winning multi-million dollar scratch tickets? Not Megabucks or Powerball tickets, but scratch tickets. I smell a rat, or a great novel.

    • They were sloppy. Even using pseudorandom numbers, you can at least use a cryptographically strong number generator to make it unfeasible to discover patterns. Furthermore, there are true hardwarde-based random number generators available for computers, so it is not correct to say that computers can only generate pseudorandom numbers.

Archives