I once wrote an article called: A Lottery Ticket is not a Retirement Plan, but I may just have to eat my words!
Or at the very least, modify them to say: A Lottery Ticket is not a Retirement Plan, but a Scratch Lottery Ticket may be!
Right now, you must think I’ve gone off the deep end, but I just read a fascinating article from Wired called Cracking the Scratch Lottery.
To sum up the entire article in a short paragraph:
It says that some scratch lottery tickets are determined by a math algorithm which is not surprising in and of itself, but you can actually see which tickets are winners or losers without ever scratching one!
For instance tic-tac-toe games where you see the numbers given on each board ahead of time, but not the unscratched “given” numbers of the ticket.
With just those given numbers on the board, you can figure out which scratch lottery tickets are winners or losers by counting the number of times each number appears on each board.
So for instance if you have a ticket with 6 boards that have the number 15 appear 3 times, you’d mark on a list #15 x 3, and so on. If you are able to find three numbers that go into a row, and are singletons, or numbers that appear only once on the board, the ticket is sure to be a winner.
Here, it’s easier to see it in a picture from: Wired – “Cracking the Scratch Lottery”
This is really fascinating stuff for me because it deals with math and statistics (which is kind of cool if you think about it, seeing as you can use statistics to predict why people who dance are more likely to buy a Mac), and because it looks like a ‘flaw’ in such a supposedly random game.
I still don’t think I’ll ever get rich playing the lottery, scratch or otherwise, mostly because I don’t believe in throwing good money away such awful odds (I’d rather use the money to buy stocks), but it makes you wonder 🙂
As the guy Mohan Srivastava who figured it out said:
His next thought was utterly predictable: “I remember thinking, I’m gonna be rich! I’m gonna plunder the lottery!” he says.
However, these grandiose dreams soon gave way to more practical concerns.
“Once I worked out how much money I could make if this was my full-time job, I got a lot less excited,” Srivastava says. “I’d have to travel from store to store and spend 45 seconds cracking each card. I estimated that I could expect to make about $600 a day. That’s not bad. But to be honest, I make more as a consultant, and I find consulting to be a lot more interesting than scratch lottery tickets.”
How much could you earn in a week or a year?
$600 / day x 5 days a week = $3000/week!!
In a month, you could pull in $12,000 or using 52 weeks in a year, $156,000 a year. You would just have to spend time in each store, bothering the store clerk who will most likely give you the suspicious side eye, counting up each number to find the singletons in a row.
If that store doesn’t have any tickets in that style of game, or you don’t find any winners, you’d have to find another store, and so on.
Actually, if you also worked on the weekends, you could make even more money 😛
$600 / day x 7 days a week = $4200/week or $218,400 a year.
For myself, when I am actually on a contract I’d still make more money than even the highest estimates (perhaps more depending on my rate) and I wouldn’t be working 7 days a week either.
But what ever will I do with myself in those months that I’m off contract ….? 😉
You’d still need to save that earned money for retirement
Even taking into account that you’d work 7 days a week, for about $600 a day, you’d still need to save all of that scratch ticket money for retirement.
Not only that, you might have a chance of hitting it big in one of those scratch tickets, but if you win anything over the amount of $600 in one ticket consistently, the lottery commission is going to become suspicious and start investigating.
For me, it’s still not worth it to take up analyzing, counting and scratching those tickets as a permanent, regular, 40 more years to go sort of day job. 🙂
I’d fall over from being cross-eyed, bored and give up. Plus, I don’t want to be charged with fraud or go to jail.
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I read this earlier this month in the wired magazine. verrry interesting.
Fascinating! But lottery was never my cup of tea, math or no math! 🙂
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Ditto. My parents are REALLY into the lottery, and I have an aversion to it.
What an interesting article! But it does seem like a ton of work and lotteries intimidate me…so much so that I have never bought a ticket.
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It\’s work that isn\’t interesting but the payoff is good if you are consistent.
One of the big hedge funds probably read about this article and offered this guy a job that pays several times better than his current job and several times better than playing the lottery. So he's probably a big winner anyway.
Exactly 🙂 And if you\’re smart at math and stats, why not?
He works in the oil and gas industry as a consultant, and I think he makes plenty of money even without a hedge fund job offer.
If it costs me macaroons then I am most definitely out.
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LOL!!! I just ate a box of 20 the other day. I shared 4 with BF 😛 shhhh!!
But they were pulling them from the market after he alerted them to this, weren't they? So plundering = not an option
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Well they actually put them back ON the market.
He says you can find them now. Or at least that\’s what I read in the article.
oooOOOoooh. I could do this one day a week and live off of that pretty dang easily. i'd also keep my day job and use the winnings for fun and travel! Ok…I need to start studying statistics and game theory. 🙂
they have something in NZ called bonus bonds. it is like the lotto only you get to keep your initial investment! such a cool idea. it is guilt-free gambling. http://www.bonusbonds.co.nz/
Bonus Bonds? I will definitely have to look into that.
Hrm… sounds interesting, and it looks like some people out there are already doing it!
But it'd be too boring for my taste…
Well of course 🙂 But I guess for most of us it isn\’t interesting work, no matter the money. And you\’d have to make sure you live in an area with a LOT of stores with those specific scratch lottery tickets… some might not have any at all.
My dad would have loved this. He owned a liquor store for a few years and he would have gone all out on this. 😀
I don't think this is fraud at all, it's just beating the system like that game show guy. (Forgot what show, the one where he push the button to win.)
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Yes that guy, Michael something or another 🙂 He found the pattern and beat it.
This reminds me of that movie (which I think was based on real events) where the card counters made a fortune in Vegas, only to get caught and the gravy train ended. If people started doing this en masse, wouldn't the lottery change the game? The house aways wins people, the house aways wins. (Go ahead, call me a cynic.)
Oh I agree. I think people could do this en masse but really.. out of all of us commenting, who would do it?
I already counted myself out…
Lazy Newbie here. This sounds like a lot of work. I think I think I'm going to try to just work harder and better at my day job, make more money and get an employer to match my retirement contribution.
The key is that it is more interesting work than counting numbers.
Wow thats really interesting. I'd never do it! Your right, it wouldbe a full time job. The gas expenses and ticket expenses alone would offset the profit.
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Well the ticket expenses would be let\’s say $2 but it\’d be an almost guaranteed win every time of $5 or $10, or whatever the payout is. Maybe even \”free tickets\”.
Still it isn\’t interesting work..
Actually, I read the original article on this a few days ago, and it turns out the lottery wouldn't necessarily be all that suspicious – auditors for that lottery had already found that a few select people were winning a heck of a lot more than they should have been, but because they are still so damn sure that their games are unbreakable, they've got better explanations for it, such as folks who make a business out of cashing winning tickets for other folks who don't want to pay taxes on it.
I also found particularly interesting the idea of using lottery tickets to launder money – buy a winning ticket off of someone with dirty money, claim the winnings, come away with clean money.
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Oh in that case… *removes fraud from the list*