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Lottery surprise

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NutmegCT

NutmegCT

Great Pumpkin
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"A Virginia man upset about not winning a scratch-off lottery game used that state’s Freedom of Information Law to find out that the top prizes in the game he was playing had already been awarded before he bought his tickets."

https://poststar.com/wordpress/?p=5541&cat=50

So you see the sign in the shop - $75,000 Jackpot! - and you buy your measly little $1 scratch ticket.

Do the rub-a-dub-dub with your dime, but darn - you didn't win the jackpot (or anything else).

Even tho' that game was still running - the prize was no longer available. But how do us poor slobs know that?

hmmmmmm ...

T.
 
ummm - so are you saying he thought there was a chance he would get something in return when he gave his money to the government? And how many phd's did he have?

BTW - said in jest. I'm a gov employee myself.
 
Very interesting, from your link:
<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Quote:] professor Scott Hoover bought a $5 scratch-off ticket in the state’s “Beginner’s Luck” game, which carried a top prize of $75,000. Hoover, a professor of business statistics .... “the numbers posted online violated basic laws of statistics,”
....
Hoover ... learned that three days before he bought his tickets, all of the grand prizes had been given out for that particular batch. He was able to obtain records that showed the Virginia State Lottery actually sold $85 million in tickets for which no top prize was available.
....
Here in New York, the state Lottery Division pulls the entire batch of scratch-off tickets from the market once the top prizes for that particular game have been claimed,
[/QUOTE]


A Stats Prof. that probably wanted to prove what lousy chances suckers (er, lottery gamblers) had... only to find they're much worse than he expected! :nopity:


Here in the UK several companies that run very similar competitions involving phone-ins have been fined enormous sums for taking money after winners had already been chosen.

https://www.thisismoney.co.uk/campaigns/t...;in_page_id=509


Lotteries are a tax on the poor and gullible,in my not-so-humble opinion....

<span style="font-style: italic"><span style="text-decoration: underline">Edited to add: He likely had one PhD! :jester: :devilgrin:</span></span>
 
NutmegCT said:
"A Virginia man upset about not winning a scratch-off lottery game used that state’s Freedom of Information Law to find out that the top prizes in the game he was playing had already been awarded before he bought his tickets."

https://poststar.com/wordpress/?p=5541&cat=50

So you see the sign in the shop - $75,000 Jackpot! - and you buy your measly little $1 scratch ticket.

Do the rub-a-dub-dub with your dime, but darn - you didn't win the jackpot (or anything else).

Even tho' that game was still running - the prize was no longer available. But how do us poor slobs know that?

hmmmmmm ...

T.
Click to expand...

Lottery's are just another TAX for the poor IMHO.
 
Obvously his PHDs diden't give hime the sense to check the website BEFORE he wasted his 5 bucks. Hmmmmmm......
 
Banjo: 20/20 hindsight is not a rare commodity. Why shouldn't there be an expectation that this is an honestly administered lotto? PhD or uneducated doesn't matter.
 
I tend to agree that lotteries are just another tax on the poor, BUT lotteries that continue selling "chances" for a prize that has already been awarded are nothing but criminal theft!
 
If lotteries were subject to the same truth in advertising laws that govern business, there wouldn't be any lotteries.
 
Banjo said:
Obvously his PHDs diden't give hime the sense to check the website BEFORE he wasted his 5 bucks. Hmmmmmm......
Click to expand...

All I can say is that a Professor. of Statistics probably (!) had a much better idea of the odds of winning than virtually anyone else might have, and there are different ways of figuring the odds.

In the most basic approach you can simply look that the potential payoff relative to the total number of tickets- kind of like figuring the odds of getting a full house given a deck of cards.

A more sophisticated approach would be to determine the odds as the game runs- like figuring the odds of geting a full house in a card game knowing that certain cards are already dealt. The mathematics can be mind numbingly complicated, but that's what Professors of statistics are for.... :devilgrin:

It can make a more interesting example because students can readily identify with playing such games and $5 is cheap for an example in statistics that a student might actually not fall asleep hearing... :jester:
 
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