![]() ![]() "There's no way there could be a flaw, and there's no way I just happened to discover the flaw on my walk home."Īnd yet, his inner voice refused to pipe down. "Like everyone else, I assumed that the lottery was unbreakable," he says. Srivastava had been hooked by a different sort of lure-that spooky voice, whispering to him about a flaw in the game. Ticket designers fill the cards with near-misses (two-in-a-row matchups instead of the necessary three) and players spend tantalizing seconds looking for their win. Instead of just scratching off the latex and immediately discovering a loser, players have to spend time matching up the revealed numbers with the boards. Although extended-play games-sometimes referred to as baited hooks-tend to look like miniature spreadsheets, they've proven extremely popular with consumers. One important strategy involves the use of what lottery designers call extended play. As a result, many state lotteries have redesigned their tickets. ![]() But in the past two decades the competition for the gambling dollar has dramatically increased. There was a time when scratch games all but sold themselves. (In a 2006 survey, 30 percent of people without a high school degree said that playing the lottery was a wealth-building strategy.) On average, households that make less than $12,400 a year spend 5 percent of their income on lotteries-a source of hope for just a few bucks a throw. ![]() These high-frequency players tend to be poor and uneducated, which is why critics refer to lotteries as a regressive tax. While approximately half of Americans buy at least one lottery ticket at some point, the vast majority of tickets are purchased by about 20 percent of the population. (Forty-three states and every Canadian province currently run lotteries.) In some states, the lottery accounts for more than 5 percent of education funding. Since 1964, when New Hampshire introduced the first modern state lottery, governments have come to rely on gaming revenue. In the 18th and 19th centuries, lotteries funded the expansion of Harvard and Yale and allowed the construction of railroads across the continent. These tickets have a grand history: Lotteries were used to fund the American colonies and helped bankroll the young nation. The North American lottery system is a $70 billion-a-year business, an industry bigger than movie tickets, music, and porn combined. I can figure out how much gold is underground." ![]() If I know the forces, I can decipher the samples. There are fundamental geologic forces that created those numbers. "The numbers might seem random, as if the gold has just been scattered, but they're actually not random at all. "My job is to make sense of those results," he says. Each sample gives a different estimate of the amount of mineral underground. A typical assignment for Srivastava goes like this: A mining company has multiple samples from a potential gold mine. In fact, it reminded him a lot of his day job, which involves consulting for mining and oil companies. When he talks about a subject he's interested in-and he's interested in many things, from military encryption to freshwater fossils-his words start to run into each other.Īs a trained statistician with degrees from MIT and Stanford University, Srivastava was intrigued by the technical problem posed by the lottery ticket. He has a neatly trimmed beard and a messy office. Srivastava speaks quietly, with a slight stammer. "This is the smallest amount you can win, but I can't tell you how excited it made me," he says. Srivastava matched up each of his numbers with the digits on the boards, and much to his surprise, the ticket had a tic-tac-toe. If three of "Your Numbers" appeared on a board in a straight line, you'd won. The goal was to scrape off the latex and compare the numbers under it to the digits on the boards. On the left was a box headlined "Your Numbers," covered with a scratchable latex coating. Its design was straightforward: On the right were eight tic-tac-toe boards, dense with different numbers. The second ticket was a tic-tac-toe game. "I thought, 'This is exactly why I never play these dumb games.'" "The first was a loser, and I felt pretty smug," Srivastava says. He fished a coin out of a drawer and began scratching off the latex coating. The tickets were cheap scratchers-a gag gift from his squash partner-and Srivastava found himself wondering if any of them were winners. Mohan Srivastava, a geological statistician living in Toronto, was working in his office in June 2003, waiting for some files to download onto his computer, when he discovered a couple of old lottery tickets buried under some paper on his desk. ![]()
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