The Glade 4.0

Sometimes you have to make your own luck.
An elderly couple stands to make millions of dollars after purchasing more than $600,000 worth of lottery tickets over a three-day period, according to a report by the Boston Globe.

Marjorie and Gerald Selbee, both in their 70s, each bought $307,000 worth of $2 tickets for a relatively obscure Massachusetts lottery called Cash WinFall. One location that sold them half the tickets, Billy’s Beer and Wine, had sold only $47 worth of lottery tickets the day before.

The Selbees are among a small group of gamblers -- including statisticians and engineers from MIT and Northwestern University -- who were able to exploit a lottery loophole providing them with risk-free winnings. The Selbees have already claimed nearly $1 million in prize money this year.

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg, according to Mohan Srivastava, an MIT-educated statistician who gained fame when he found a flaw in a Canadian scratch ticket game that allowed him to pick the winners more than 90 percent of the time.

“Cash WinFall isn’t being played as a game of chance. Some smart people have figured out how to get rich while everyone else funds their winnings,” Srivastava told the Boston Globe.

According to Srivastava, because of the way Cash WinFall is setup, a gambler who bought 200,000 tickets during a special four-week period would not only cover his investment, but also make anywhere from $240,000 to $1.4 million in guaranteed profit. All in all, Srivastava calculates the top five groups and individuals playing Cash WinFall collectively win $1 million to $6 million in profits every year from less than two weeks of gambling, the Globe reported.

How it Works

The secret is timing.
The game itself is simple: If the numbers on six randomly selected balls match the ones on your ticket, you win the jackpot -- which only one person has ever won since the game’s creation in 2004.

The jackpot grows slowly over time from a low of $500,000 to a limit of $2 million to $2.5 million. When the limit is reached and no one has won, the jackpot is redistributed across the smaller prizes for those who matched three, four or five numbers correctly.
See Also: Statistician Cracks Secret Code Behind Lottery Tickets

When these "rolldowns" occur, the odds of a significant payout increase dramatically.

According to Mark Kon, a professor of math and statistics at Boston University, the trick only works if you buy enough tickets. Someone who buys $100,000 worth of tickets has a 74 percent chance of winning during the rolldown week; for bettors like Selbee who spend at least $500,000, there is nearly no risk of losing money, Kon told the Boston Globe.

But Paul Sternburg, the lottery’s executive director, believes they have no reason to apologize or even change the lottery's procedures -- pointing to $11.8 million in profits in 2011.

"It’s a niche game for a different audience," he told the Boston Globe. "You want to bring in as many players as possible. Some people chase a huge jackpot. Others are looking at odds."

For more savvy players -- including an engineer from MIT -- who have bested the lottery, see the full story on The Boston Globe.

Apparently it isn't a tax on those who can do the math.

This++

Marjorie and Gerald Selbee, both in their 70s, each bought $307,000 worth of $2 tickets for a relatively obscure Massachusetts lottery called Cash WinFall. One location that sold them half the tickets, Billy’s Beer and Wine, had sold only $47 worth of lottery tickets the day before

Knight - Hi, Laslo.
Hollyfeld - I thought you might want some help so I dug into the computer and got every question Artherton's ever asked on every final he's ever given.
Knight - Gee, I didn't get you anything. Is that them?
Hollyfeld - No, these are entries for McDonald's Sweepstakes. No purchase necessary. Enter as often as you want. So, I am.
Knight - Really?
Hollyfeld - This box makes it one million, six hundred thousand. I should win thirty two point six percent of the prizes, including the car.

You're not reading that right, Midgen. He sold them $307k worth of tickets in one day.

She was called the luckiest woman in the world.
But now that luck is being called into question by some who think that winning the lottery four times is more than just a coincidental spell of good fortune.
Joan R. Ginther, 63, from Texas, won multiple million dollar payouts each time.

First, she won $5.4 million, then a decade later, she won $2 million, then two years later $3 million and finally, in the spring of 2008, she hit a $10 million jackpot.
The odds of this has been calculated at one in eighteen septillion and luck like this could only come once every quadrillion years.
Harper's reporter Nathanial Rich recently wrote an article about Ms Ginther, which questioned the validity of this 'luck' with which she attributes her multiple lottery wins to.
First, he points out, Ms Ginther is a former math professor with a PhD from Stanford University specialising in statistics.
A professor at the Institute for the Study of Gambling & Commercial Gaming at the University of Nevada, Reno, told Mr Rich: 'When something this unlikely happens in a casino, you arrest ‘em first and ask questions later.'
Although Ms Ginther now lives in Las Vegas, she won all four of her lotteries in Texas.
Three of her wins, all in two-year intervals, were by scratch-off tickets bought at the same mini mart in the town of Bishop.
Mr Rich proceeds to detail the myriad ways in which Ms Ginther could have gamed the system - including the fact that she may have figured out the algorithm that determines where a winner is placed in each run of scratch-off tickets.
He believes that after Ms Ginther figured out the algorithm, it wouldn’t be too difficult to then determine where the tickets would be shipped, as the shipping schedule is apparently fixed, and there were a few sources she could have found it out from.
According to Forbes, the residents of Bishop, Texas, seem to believe God was behind it all.
The Texas Lottery Commission told Mr Rich that Ms Ginther must have been 'born under a lucky star', and that they don’t suspect foul play.

Harper's reporter Nathanial Rich recently wrote an article about Ms Ginther, which questioned the validity of this 'luck' with which she attributes her multiple lottery wins to.

My inner grammar nazi just cried out in pain.

A professor at the Institute for the Study of Gambling & Commercial Gaming at the University of Nevada, Reno, told Mr Rich: 'When something this unlikely happens in a casino, you arrest ‘em first and ask questions later.'

No, you don't. The casino might kick them out (with their winnings) and forbid them from coming back, but "gaming the system" using statistics (such as with card counting) is not illegal.