Most sane comment ever on lotteries...

[onager]

Sometimes I take a look at the TV show "Lottery Changed My Life." It's a lot of fun to see somebody, oh...let's say blathering to Jesus, thanking him for the Big Win, then go out and develop a meth-and-hookers habit that rapidly returns them to reality. And poverty.

I've heard lottery winners credit everybody from God to Jesus to personal saints to psychics and even dead relatives for their winnings.

Today one of the featured lottery winners was a doctor in Florida. She spent 20 years as director of a Pediatric Emergency ward, which has to be a horrible job sometimes.

She won, IIRC, $56 million in the Florida lottery. A lot of her co-workers were EXTREMELY pissed and she mentioned some of the comments she heard: "She's already rich. She didn't deserve to win the Lottery. I deserve to win the lottery, I'm not a doctor." Etc. etc.

The doctor said: "I never thought it was a matter of anyone DESERVING to win the lottery. It's all just random chance."

That is the most sane comment I've ever heard a lottery winner make on this show.

Incidentally, the doctor's luck wasn't all great after the Big Win. Her husband nearly died with liver failure. They only found a donor at the last minute, but he did pull thru. The doctor said that experience really put the lottery win in perspective for her.

Along with big donations to charity, she's paying for all her nieces (and her daughter) to go to college.

[lizerdbits]

1. If I'm picking up a soda in a convenience store

The store will sometimes advertise that they had a big lotto winner. They don't realize that the probability of the same store selling more big winning tickets than other stores is so slim that advertising that should hurt business. Apparently it doesn't. For some reason people must think the store is lucky.

[realisticphish]

2. but that's a fallacy too, really

the fact that they just had a winner doesn't make it LESS likely, either. It's random (more or less), so the status of a ticket at a particular place being a winner has no effect whatsoever on the statuses thereafter, good or bad.


Now, would the man on the street understand that? Doubtful.

[onager]

3. A Skepticism Story - The Man...er, Men Who Broke The Bank...

...At Monte Carlo.

Two men actually did it, both at the roulette wheel, and a more odd couple would be hard to find. Though "breaking the bank," I should note, only means they ran one table out of chips. AFAIK, nobody has ever come close to winning all the money in any casino anywhere.

The most famous winner (with a song written about him) was con man Charles Wells, who specialized in getting financial backing for non-existent inventions. A perpetual-motion sort of guy.

In July 1891 Wells won 2 million francs over a couple of days, including betting on the number "5" for five successive spins of the roulette wheel.

Some people were dumb enough to invest in his "sure-fire roulette system" along with his bogus inventions. In 1892 he returned to Monte Carlo as a celebrity, arriving in style aboard a borrowed yacht with his mistress.

Wells broke the bank SIX more times on that trip...then lost all his winnings plus a load of investors' money. He admitted that his "system" was nothing but a monster lucky streak. Wells then won fraud convictions in Britain AND France, spent years in prison, and died broke.

The more obscure bank-breaker was English mill engineer Joseph Jaggers in 1873. Jaggers suspected one roulette wheel in a Monte Carlo casino was unbalanced and biased toward certain numbers.

Being an engineer, he hired 6 clerks to record all the winning roulette numbers for several days. Sure enough, Jaggers found a pattern. Five of the casino's six roulette wheels were truly random, but on the sixth wheel, certain numbers hit more often than others.

The casino got suspicious of Jaggers' constant winning and switched the roulette wheels around. But Jaggers identified his favorite wheel by a tiny scratch, and kept playing, eventually raking in about $450,000.

The casino then sent all the wheels back to the manufacturer. After losing about $125,000 on the new wheels, Jaggers quit while he was ahead, went back to England and never visited Monte Carlo again.

[charlie]

4. Do you remember a newscast

from, I dunno, 20 years ago? A woman hit the big one on a Vegas slot machine. So, a news crew took her back to the casino to tape her on the lucky machine. They asked another lady who was already playing to step aside, and BAM, the woman won her second jackpot on the first pull. The poor lady sidelined looked like she was going to swallow her head. Of course, a royal court battle followed, and I believe the 2nd woman had to settle for just a few grand.

[onager]

5. No, but thanks - great story.

Sort of on-topic - that show "Lottery Changed My Life" has featured several people who won lotteries more than once, usually in the same state.

This week they also had a guy who won $3 million in the Pennsylvania State Lottery, after his brother-in-law won $600,000.

One winner, in a previous show, was a Fundie who made a big show out of donating $$$$ to his church and generally hallelujahing all over the place after his win. There was amateur video of him giving a big check to his church, etc. etc.

Eventually he got a hot, young new stripper girlfriend, which severely pissed off his wife and (mostly grown) kids. His wife moved out and the whole family stopped talking to him.

You probably already figured out the rest of the story. With the new girlfriend, he couldn't survive on his measly annual lottery payments, which I think were $100,000 a year. So he took a payout from one of those sleazy annuity companies that advertise heavily on TV. An incredibly stupid thing to do. He traded something like $9 million in eventual payouts for a one-time settlement of $2 or 3 million, IIRC.

The real kicker is that he did everything right when he won the lottery - he hired a good lawyer and financial advisors. But as the financial advisor said on camera: they gave him good advice but he refused to take it.

And of course, he proceeded to burn thru the lump-sum payment quickly. Soon he was flat broke and wanted to reconcile with his ex-wife. When she and the rest of the family showed up for an appointment at his place, he had committed suicide and left a note saying the lottery win was the worst thing that ever happened to him.

Your problem wasn't the lottery, bud.