Link Via Consumerist Image Via doncav [Flickr]

Someone very smart once told me that the lottery is like a tax for the mathematically stupid, but apparently you can make playing lottery a profitable venture ... if you're good at math (kids, this is why you should stay in school).

Here's the story of how a loophole in the Massachusetts lottery game Cash WinFall made it a surefire bet for some mathematically savvy gamblers:

Over the next three days, Selbee bought $307,000 worth of $2 tickets for a relatively obscure game called Cash WinFall, tying up the machine that spits out the pink tickets for hours at a time. Down the road at Jerry’s Place, a coffee shop in South Deerfield, Selbee’s husband, Gerald, was also spending $307,000 on Cash WinFall. Together, the couple bought more than 300,000 tickets for a game whose biggest prize - about $2 million - has been claimed exactly once in the game’s seven-year history.

But the Selbees, who run a gambling company called GS Investment Strategies, know a secret about the Massachusetts State Lottery: For a few days about every three months, Cash WinFall may be the most reliably lucrative lottery game in the country. Because of a quirk in the rules, when the jackpot reaches roughly $2 million and no one wins, payoffs for smaller prizes swell dramatically, which statisticians say practically assures a profit to anyone who buys at least $100,000 worth of tickets.

During these brief periods - “rolldown weeks’’ in gambling parlance - a tiny group of savvy bettors, among them highly trained computer scientists from MIT and Northeastern University, virtually take over the game. Just three groups, including the Selbees, claimed 1,105 of the 1,605 winning Cash WinFall tickets statewide after the rolldown week in May, according to lottery records. They also appear to have purchased about half the tickets, based on reports from the stores that the top gamblers frequent most.

“Cash WinFall isn’t being played as a game of chance. Some smart people have figured out how to get rich while everyone else funds their winnings,’’ said Mohan Srivastava, an MIT-educated statistician who gained fame in gambling circles when he found a flaw in a Canadian scratch ticket game that allowed him to pick the winners more than 90 percent of the time.

Andrea Estes and Scott Allen of The Boston Globe has the story: Link

Previously on Neatorama: A Statistician Solves a Scratch Lottery Code

What does it take for Johan Fourie to visit his mom? Winning the lottery, apparently:

When Johan Fourie’s mom asked him on Sunday when he was going to come visit her, his answer was as funny as it was seemingly unrealistic.

"When I win the lottery," Fourie said.

Moments later, Fourie checked his Florida Lotto ticket and saw that he had actually won the $4 million jackpot.

"I had no idea I would be calling her back later that day to tell her I was on my way!" he said Wednesday.

Link

“… I start looking at the tic-tac-toe game, and I begin to wonder how they make these things,” Srivastava says. “The tickets are clearly mass-produced, which means there must be some computer program that lays down the numbers. Of course, it would be really nice if the computer could just spit out random digits. But that’s not possible, since the lottery corporation needs to control the number of winning tickets. The game can’t be truly random. Instead, it has to generate the illusion of randomness while actually being carefully determined.”

He discovered that the numbers on the card before scratching provided information about the numbers underneath the latex. Specifically, he found that “singletons” – numbers present only once on a card – were likely to indicate the location of a successful scratch. After cracking the code, he calculated that he could win about $600/day if he spent full-time buying and scratching cards.  Instead, he took his information to the Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corporation.

A sample card is shown at left.  Details of his logic and calculations are explained at the Wired link.

Link.

Wilson is a loyal dog -up to a point. This poignant yet funny ad is for the New Zealand Lottery. The song is “To Be By Your Side” by Nick Cave.  -via Bits and Pieces

Each of Ginther’s triumphs has netted her a seven-figure sum of money and her winnings now top $20 million.

Her first success was in 1993, when she won half of an $11 million Texas Lottery jackpot. She then had something of a dry stretch, going a whole 13 years without another win. Then, in 2006, she won $2 million with a scratch–off ticket.

In 2008 it was $3 million prize from a scratch card. On Monday, she claimed her biggest win yet in the Extreme Payout competition.

Link via Stuff | Photo (unrelated) by Flickr user Robert S. Donovan used under Creative Commons license

Sports Minister Svilen Neikov ordered an investigation after the numbers 4, 15, 23, 24, 35 and 42 were selected, in a different order, by a machine live on television on September 6 and 10. The results caused suspicions of manipulation.

An investigation found no wrongdoing in the draw or determining the winners, its chairman Konstantin Simeonov said.

"We cannot talk about any manipulation," he said.

The chance of the same six numbers coming up twice in two consecutive rounds was one in more than 4 million but was not impossible, respected mathematician Michail Konstantinov has said.

Link (Photo: Stoyan Nenov / Reuters)

Then Shell strolled out of the building and into the hands of Peel Regional Police officers.

He was wanted on a six-year-old warrant for failing to appear, theft under $5,000 and possession of property obtained by crime.

According to a spokesman for the OLG, every lottery winner undergoes a security check, and if anything is turned up during the course of the investigation the matter is turned over to the Ontario Provincial Police.

At least he was able to raise the bail. Link -via Arbroath

From the Upcoming Queue, submitted by Minnesotastan.

This Hummer H3 is built from $35,000 in losing lottery tickets. No sheet metal here, folks. The piece is by Brooklyn-based artists Adam Eckstrom and Lauren Was and it’s entitled Ghost of a Dream. The tickets came from local bodegas, where they were discarded by unlucky patrons.

See more pictures at Jalopnik. Link -via Unique Daily

The Peters children think their father would have appreciated the irony.

Peters bought two Connecticut Lottery tickets at a local 7-Eleven store on Nov. 1 as part of a 20-year tradition he shared with his wife Charlotte. Later that day, the 79-year-old retired hat factory worker suffered a fatal heart attack while working in his yard in Danbury. [...]

"He’d be very mad, he just passed away and she won a lot of money," said Brian Peters, one of the couple’s three children. "He’d say, ‘Figures!"’

Link