The Lottery: Loving Spin They’re In

The people who run state lotteries have noticed for some time now that people are no longer excited by the chance of becoming a millionaire.

Being a millionaire is no longer that big a deal. What, after all, can a mere million buy you today?

A not very nice yacht. A not very nice co-op in New York. A not very nice home that maybe is walking distance from the beach in California.

So why bother? Why play the lottery for a lousy million? Why not just take the money you would have spent on lottery tickets and do something dull like pay the rent or buy food?

Since states with lotteries are now dependent on lottery income (hopelessly in the grip would be a more accurate term), these states must encourage people to play.

They do this by slick, expensive commercials which encourage people to play regardless of their ability to afford it. And they also do this by raising the jackpots.

Last weekend, the world’s biggest lottery jackpot was held in Chicago and I was there for it.

When the jackpot reached $55 million and continued climbing, people really start getting interested. Lines in 7-Elevens were an hour long.

At the peak, 30,000 lottery tickets were being sold every minute. I’ll do the math for you: People were buying 1.8 million tickets per hour.

And at O’Hare Airport, an airport experienced travelers avoid whenever they can, a strange thing started happening: People began re-routing their travel plans to come to O’Hare to buy tickets.

State lottery offices had been getting calls from Europe, Japan and South America from people desperately trying to buy tickets. They offered to send money. Or gold. Or letters of credit from their banks.

But they were told that according to state law, they had to purchase the tickets on Illinois soil. Many flew to America for the opportunity. And Americans, who were flying from Boston to Los Angeles, for instance, stopped taking non-stops and started flying into Chicago so they could buy tickets at the lottery counter at the airport.

A Chicago newspaper printed one of the most extraordinary things I had ever seen: A service that tells you how frequently a number has won the lottery.

It listed the 10 numbers that had won the most since the lottery began. The number 28 came up most often, 19% of the time, for instance. Then there was a big chart showing how many times each number from 1 to 35 had come up.

So if you were going to play 32 (which you should since it was Sandy Koufax’s number), you could find out that 32 had come up 12 times, most often paired with number 14 and it had been eight lotto games since it last came up.

What is extraordinary about this is that the chart is nonsense. It is true and accurate, but it is also nonsense.

As both mathematicians and real gamblers can tell you, a lottery (like roulette) is a game in which there are no odds of one number coming up vs. another number coming up.

Each leap of the lottery ball (or bounce of the roulette ball) is independent of anything that has gone before. A lotto game is just as likely to come up 1-2-3-4-5-6 as it is to come up what it did in Illinois last weekend: 3-14-32-40-46-54. (See? I told you to play 32.)

And, in fact, there are no odds against it coming up 1-2-3-4-5-6 every time. Each drawing is independent of the last. Honest.

So charts telling you what has come up and how often it has come up and all the rest are meaningless.

Nobody believes this, however. And by the time the Illinois lottery hit $69 million, everyone I know was playing it. It was a national news story. ABC, to its credit, also did a story pointing out how state lotteries, which exist in 28 states and Washington, D.C., have probably caused a dramatic increase in the number of compulsive gamblers in America.

On the day before the winning ticket was drawn, there was a small story that caught my eye. A few miles west of Chicago, a gambling den was raided. Dice were found and 42 people were arrested. They were lead off in handcuffs, taken to jail and charged with gambling. Fifty-thousand dollars was confiscated. Authorities were pleased.

Betting on crap games in Illinois is a very bad thing. Buying $1.8-million worth of lottery tickets an hour in Illinois is a very good thing.

I left town just before the winning numbers were drawn. As it turned out, there were four winning tickets. So nobody will be getting $69 million. Each ticket will pay off only $17.25 million. Big deal.

And you don’t have to ask what the winners will do with their money. They will do what winners always do no matter how much they win:

They will buy more lottery tickets.