Tuesday, October 31, 2006

How to win the lottery

I have a dream. It starts with a job in the service industry, and it ends with a sophisticated drink on a stretch of beach. Apparently a suspicious number of retailers and clerks are winning lotteries in Ontario.
Excerpt from the CBC:

The Fifth Estate reported that retailers in Ontario won large prizes nearly 200 times in the past seven years. There are roughly 60,000 lottery ticket sellers in Ontario.
A University of Toronto statistician, who crunched the numbers for the television show, said the chance of retailers winning that often is "about one chance in a trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion," and estimated the number of wins should be closer to 57.
Ha! How do you like them statistics? As ombudsman André Marin is quoted as saying, perhaps the lottery is not so much a game of luck as it is a game of trust.

3 comments:

happyjuggler0 said...

I remember a long time ago reading about a law in Massachusetts (where I lived at the time) that penalized (somehow or another)retailers for scanning losing scratch tickets.

What could (would!!!) happen in the absence of such a law is that retailers scan tickets and if they are winners, they keep them and if they are losers they sell them.

I highly recommend never buying a scratch ticket that the clerk had already torn off the sheet, and demand one that is attached to the rest of them.

Better yet, don't play the lottery, and set aside the money to invest. You won't get rich that way, but eventually you'll almost certainly live more richly.

true dough said...

Geez. I had no idea. I only play the lottery when Santa throws scratch and wins in my stocking. I always knew I was getting ripped off...

Anonymous said...

In my opinion lottery it's a investment but at high risk. You must invest some money and you can earn a lot. I know that the chance of winning are very poor but if you win you become rich in one second. Personally I play at Australian Saturday Lotto results.