The Lotto Tipsters: They Have Your Number

One day recently, Larry Love pointed to a box of numbers in his tip sheet, Lotto Edge, and said in a voice that was three-fourths conviction and one-fourth hope, “These numbers just haven’t been hitting. They have to start coming up.” Two days later, Love was ecstatic. Five of the six numbers drawn that week in the state’s Lotto 6/49 game, and the bonus number as well, had appeared on his “25 Most Probable” list.

Frank Markovic was not impressed. In fact, he said Larry Love is misleading people.

“One number isn’t any more probable than the others, because Lotto is random,” said Markovic, who happens to sell devices that choose numbers randomly. “The best way to play is to pick numbers by random. Then if you win, you’ll get more money than people who play lucky numbers or birthdays (commonly played numbers that tend to split winning pools).”

Lotto Entrepreneurs

Love, 36, of Los Angeles, and Markovic, 32, of Van Nuys, hope to make a living from the Lotto 6/49 game, but not as players. They are among a growing number of entrepreneurs who offer products and services related to Lotto, the numbers game introduced in October by the California State Lottery to counter flagging sales of scratch-off tickets.

One company sells legal contracts designed to protect players who pool their money and might lose a big prize to a partner who absconds. Another has converted old postage-stamp machines so that, for a quarter, they dispense six numbers to persons who cannot think of their own. Several 976-prefix services also provide sets of numbers at $2 a crack, one of them from a recording calling herself Sexy Salame. (“They call me sexy because I’m hot, and I’ve got six hot numbers just for you.”)

But mathematicians generally agree that gimmicks and advisers can do little, if anything, to improve a person’s chances of winning.

“There are no systems at all that will help you if you are playing against a fair machine and against a fair house,” said USC mathematics professor Louis Gordon. “The game is set up so that the house beats nearly everybody.”

Gordon cited the 50% cut taken by the state from the Lotto pool, along with the infinitesimal one-in-nearly-14-million chance of picking six of six numbers, as reasons why Lotto is a poor bet. He said the game remains a poor bet even when no one wins the grand prize and it is “rolled over,” or added to the following week’s grand prize pool.

Yet people are playing. Tickets sales in recent weeks have averaged 12 million, and the number is rising. Growing, too, is the range of services and products available to players. Herschel Elkins, head of the consumer protection section of the state attorney general’s office, said many Lotto entrepreneurs bend the law, but can do so with impunity.

‘Consumer Is Being Misled’

“Certainly all these advertisements that say they can benefit you are misleading,” said Elkins, “or else the whole random basis of the thing (the Lotto drawing) is wrong. So the consumer is being misled. But the difference is that the state has gotten into gambling.”

Elkins compared questionable Lotto advisers to horse racing touts, who often promise more than they deliver but who are tolerated because they exist in a state-sanctioned industry that generates significant tax dollars.

A lottery spokesman said that as long as Lotto advisers “don’t represent themselves as being part of the state operation, there’s no problem.” The lottery’s security division is aware of no cases of fraud in connection with Lotto, he said, adding that sting operations and arrests thus far have been confined to counterfeiters of scratch-off tickets.

In Pennsylvania in 1980, however, four people were convicted of rigging that state’s lotto game by injecting paint into all the balls except numbers four and six, increasing the likelihood that they would be drawn.

Even blatantly illegal operations, such as companies that solicit Californians to place bets by telephone on out-of-state lotteries, are largely ignored by authorities.

“For one thing, we never get complaints,” Elkins said. “Also, they have 800 numbers and they’re out of state. They probably figure they won’t be extradited.”

Elkins and others note that some Lotto pitches are aimed at particularly gullible buyers.

New York astrologer Lynne Palmer will provide a daily forecast of your gambling luck for $40 a month. Bishop L. L. Foster, who calls his Sacramento company the World of Spiritual Numerology, will draw up your “unique vibration calendar” for $19.95. Zeina Amara, a columnist in lottery magazines, claims to see numbers “not as figures, but as tiny living beings with their own personalities and behavior patterns.”

Nearly all Lotto entrepreneurs say their business is growing because the public wants to play the game but doesn’t understand it well. Lottery officials agree, predicting that Lotto 6/49 and its clones (a second game with a three- or four-number drawing is being developed) eventually will pass scratch-off games in popularity.

As in the scratch-off game, Lotto costs $1 per play. The difference is that the player chooses his own numbers. In a recent Times Poll, almost one in three Lotto players cited control as their primary reason for playing. People buy their tickets at one of 5,000 outlets linked statewide by computer and must wait for the weekly Saturday-night drawing to see if they have won.

State officials proudly point out that the lottery is the nation’s second most successful retailer, with only Sears showing a larger total profit. The boast has serious implications for players of the games, because the huge profit (34% to schools, 16% for administration) makes the lottery one of the most unfavorable gambles around.

Yet many Lotto entrepreneurs claim that by selecting numbers wisely, players can overcome the state’s onerous cut. There are two main approaches. One calls for divining the numbers most likely to be drawn and playing them. The other maintains that outguessing the random drawing is impossible, but that by selecting the least-played numbers, a person will collect significantly larger payoffs if he wins.

Low Numbers Favored

“People like low numbers,” explained Donald Ylvisaker, a UCLA mathematics professor who works as a Lotto consultant for the state. “They like sevens and 11s and 13s. They play birthday numbers, which are always 12 or under for months and 31 or under for days. So if you play those low numbers and win, you’ll be sharing the prize with a relatively large number of people.”

Lottery officials were unable to provide lists of the most- and least-played numbers in Lotto. However, “Dr. Z’s 6/49 Lotto Guidebook” by Canadian professor William T. Ziemba states that studies of Canadian lotteries show the 10 least-played numbers to be 40, 39, 20, 30, 41, 38, 42, 46, 29 and 49.

Payouts in California’s Lotto have varied widely, suggesting that some numbers are played far more often than others. There are five tiers of prizes--the grand prize for picking six of six, which has paid a high of $17.9 million and a low of $3.9 million; five of six plus the bonus number, which has paid between $1.1 million and $171,856; five of six without the bonus number, $11,000 to $1,300; four of six, $118 to $27; and three of six, which always pays $5. (Players’ numbers do not have to be picked in any particular order in order to match numbers that are drawn.)

“The main thing is that people are not patient,” claimed Reuben Citores, 38, of Menlo Park. Citores has written books on Lotto under the pen name Robert Serotic. “If they would play the same numbers with a good wheeling system and stick with it, they would win. But they switch numbers or systems.”

Citores said he writes under a pen name “because Lotto players are nuts; they’ll call you in the middle of the night.” He said that his books sold 25,000 copies in February, mostly in California. The books describe wheeling systems, which allow a person to play a group of numbers in an orderly way.

Suppose, for example, that a person wants to play 10 specific numbers. Buying a ticket on every possible combination of the 10 numbers would cost $210. If the player is lucky and six of his 10 numbers are drawn, he will win the grand prize once and the prize for five numbers 24 times.

Eliminating Overkill

Wheeling systems lower the player’s investment by eliminating such overkill. For $18, he can arrange his 10 choices in combinations that assure at least a third-level prize if six of his 10 choices are drawn. For $3 he can be assured of a fourth-level prize.

“It’s a smart way to play, but people need help doing it,” said Brian Berkovits, product manager of CVDS Inc., a telecommunications manufacturer in Montreal. “That’s where Loto-Master comes in.”

Loto-Master is a hand-held calculator that can wheel up to 18 numbers. It also will choose numbers by random for persons who would rather play that way. The device sells for $65 and is advertised in lottery magazines.

Random numbers are the specialty of Bardeen Products, a New York company than began distributing its line in California in January. Bardeen’s biggest seller is a $1.29 plastic device containing six BB-sized balls which, when shaken, will fall into any of 49 slots. The Lotto player then buys a ticket on those numbers. The company sells a similar ball-point pen priced at $2.99.

Enough players prefer to cast their fate to the wind that the state’s Lotto machines are built with a random number generator called a Quick Pick. Not yet offered, the feature will be made available sometime soon, lottery officials said. Players using Quick Pick will not have to fill out a ticket blank, since the Lotto terminal chooses the numbers.

Resembles Video Game

Another random-number selector is Astropick, a machine that resembles a small video game. For 25 cents, it gives both a visual and printed read-out of five sets of six random numbers. A spokesman for Dial Lotto Inc., the machine’s California distributor, said Astropick is in only about a dozen Lotto outlets statewide so far.

Larry Love, publisher of Lotto Edge, believes that many people want to study their picks rather than make them randomly.

“My paper is like a Racing Form for Lotto players,” he said. “You can handicap the lottery the way you do the horses.”

The weekly Lotto Edge uses a computer to keep track of the numbers drawn most and least often, the pairs of numbers most frequently drawn and similar statistics. Love also prints news items, wheeling systems and other features.

Gail Howard of White Plains, New York, a one-person lottery conglomerate, said that Californians are “a lot more inventive than on the East Coast. They’re coming out with lots of new products.”

Howard publishes a lottery magazine and a newsletter, sells her own lottery guidebook, owns a share of a random-number machine company, has a lottery news syndicate, hosts a weekly cable TV show and conducts 3-hour seminars for lottery players. She has run large ads in classified sections of general-circulation newspapers, claiming that her systems have allowed her to “win the Lottery 72 times.”

In a telephone interview, however, Howard admitted she has never won a grand prize.

“I win prizes consistently but I’ve never won a jackpot,” she said. “But I’m in the black overall and that’s a feat. In this high-odds game, it’s very hard to show a profit.”

Perhaps the most unusual innovation to crop up around California’s Lotto game is Lottery Clubs of America, owned in part by Robert Rosenberg of Huntington Beach.

“The idea is that people want to join together, pooling their money to have a better chance at a big prize,” Rosenberg said. “But what happens if they win, and the one with the ticket gets greedy and won’t share?”

As a preventive measure, the group can purchase a lottery club kit for $9.95. The kit contains bylaws, a contract-like signature roster, a record-keeping sheet and two lottery club lapel buttons. Of course, if the club has more than two members, some equitable method must be found for deciding who gets the buttons.

The members just might hold a lottery.