Is this true randomness..is there such a thing anymore?

Stopped to get a Coke at a convenience store where I met up with a friend who has more money at his heighth of retirement than he knows what to do with. His goal today was to play the scratch-off that was so unpopular (according to him) because buyers had been purchasing them all over town and no one was winning. Well, I left and came back in an hour after doing some business-and true to his word, he had bought the rest of the roll-$250 worth-and not ONEwinning ticket-and this on a $5 ticket. So ask me why I change machines so often.:cool::rolleyes:

He went through 50 of the $5 tickets and not one winner? Are you sure he knows how to correctly "read" the scratchers???

What state are you in Sling? In Illinois, on the current $5.00 scratch off games, the odds of having a winner (and this would be mostly the small winners as it is a blended %) is around 4% for each of the various games. I don't know what the odds are for a meaningfull winner but they are very rare I'm sure.

So in 50 tickets, he should have had only 2 winners (in Illinois). Arci can better tell you what the deviation from the norm is but it probably is not that rare of an occurrence to go 0 fer 50 if 2 is the norm.

My error-I misread the odds. Odds in Illinois on those type of games are 4-1, not 4%. Disregard the above.

I've bought California scratchers at the $5 denomination and I think one out of three is a winner, but a winner could be a free ticket or your money back. A couple of years ago I got five of them for a birthday present, and kept rolling over the winners into new tickets until I finally hit a "goodie" that paid $350 and then I quit. Yes, I quit when ahead!!!

edited to add: I just checked the California lottery website, and with the $5 scratchers the odds of winning are about one in 3.5 for getting a prize.

Unless sling posts the odds on that particular game we won't really know if it's unusual or not. However, a VP machine does not work like pull tabs, etc. So, it's really a meaningless comparison.

VP is as much a game of chance as lottery tickets. Only an uneducated pessimist would put any sort of untrue spin at all on this. In fact, for someone only believes what a phoney like Bob Dancer writes and disbelieves what Mike Shackleford writes, you would think and indeed expect such a person would better understand sling's comparison.

Get a good, uninterrupted night's sleep.

I think what we really need to know is what the stated odds are for the game that sling is referring to. If like the California scratchers with 1:3.5 odds he really is telling us about a run of bad luck. But if the game he is referring to has one winning ticket in 100 then there would be nothing unusual about what he reported. So slingshot, what were the odds? And if you tell us the game, I am sure we can check it online. The California lottery has a web page for the scratcher games with stated odds. I am sure it is the same with your state's games.

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Originally Posted by Rob.Singer

VP is as much a game of chance as lottery tickets. Only an uneducated pessimist would put any sort of untrue spin at all on this.

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I think everyone agrees that video poker is a game of chance. The difference between playing VP and playing a scratcher is that with a scratcher it is predetermined whether or not you will have a winner. In video poker, you have choices which can make you win or if you choose the wrong cards, you could give up a winner.

I don't know of any scratchers that let you choose "draws." I have to agree that it's really a meaningless comparison to video poker.

Scratchers are more like watching someone else roll two dice while you are betting at a craps table. You have to "live" with the result of the roll. But if you have the chance to roll the dice yourself, you have the chance to influence the roll (however slim that might be) to have the dice give you a winning combination.

I thought it was interesting that in the original post slingshot wrote "the scratch-off that was so unpopular (according to him) because buyers had been purchasing them all over town and no one was winning." Perhaps this was a "long shot" scratcher and not like here in California with the 1:3.5 odds?? In which case we have to ask, was his friend betting on "red" because the result board at roulette was showing a long run of "black"??

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Originally Posted by slingshot

Stopped to get a Coke at a convenience store where I met up with a friend who has more money at his heighth of retirement than he knows what to do with. His goal today was to play the scratch-off that was so unpopular (according to him) because buyers had been purchasing them all over town and no one was winning. Well, I left and came back in an hour after doing some business-and true to his word, he had bought the rest of the roll-$250 worth-and not ONEwinning ticket-and this on a $5 ticket. So ask me why I change machines so often.:cool::rolleyes:

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Unless this town is Mayberry, how would your friend know that "no one was winning"? (Besides, some winners may choose to keep it a secret). If this is a State sponsored lottery ticket, there could be winners all over the state, which would make the game and its odds totally legit.

I'm in Texas and I didn't even thing about getting odds on this ticket or that it would have made any difference. The story gets even funnier. When I got back, he said "there's that damn number 37 again!" Apparently the number 37 was on almost every ticket! To make matters worse, guess what number was on the last ticket as a possible winning number? And guess what number DID NOT show up as he scratched-after being on almost every other ticket? And guess who said they'd never play this stupid game again?

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Originally Posted by Vegas Vic

Unless this town is Mayberry, how would your friend know that "no one was winning"? (Besides, some winners may choose to keep it a secret). If this is a State sponsored lottery ticket, there could be winners all over the state, which would make the game and its odds totally legit.

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It's a small town and apparently this guys goes to about 4-5 different places and he spends so much dough the girls pretty much give him all the info he needs. Even the girl at the counter said that at her store that particular card was a losing piece of ****.

So which state lottery game is this, what is the name of the game, so I can look up the odds on the Internet?

It sounds like the distributor of these cards is not doing a good job of mixing them. If one particular number shows up more often than average (which appears to be the case) then it looks like the cards were printed in close to a sequential order. In other words, it really isn't a random distribution at any particular location where a subset of all the cards shows up. Sounds incredibly strange to me. Of course, that would mean some locations around the state would have lots and lots of winners.

Once again I got a good laugh out of Singer's comment. How anyone can listen to someone who continually shows such ignorance is beyond me.

Arc, you really can't make any judgments here. We are talking about one consumer who purchased 50 scratchers and is reporting that he saw the same number. Remember, it's 50 scratchers. How many numbers are on each scratcher? I'd certainly like to know the name of the game and the state to look it up.

The number 37 might indeed appear on every game but could be assigned a different value on each scratcher. Just to give you an idea about the different ways games are played and numbers are valued (any variety of tables are possible) here is a look at the California website and explanation for its games:

http://www.calottery.com/play/scratc...es/how-to-play

Alan, you are correct ... it all depends on the game. In my reply I assumed the numbers were meaningful since it was brought up. It may not be. Most pull tabs have the same symbols on every card. So, if this is more like pull tabs then the numbers themselves are meaningless.

If this is a Texas Scratch-Off game we are talking about, this comes from the Texas Lottery website:

Game results http://www.txlottery.org/export/site..._Offs/all.html

Game odds for several different games:

Overall odds of winning any prize in Instant Riches are 1 in 3.65 including break-even prizes.

Overall odds of winning any prize in $100,000 Winnings are 1 in 3.83 including break-even prizes.

Overall odds of winning any prize in Golden Spades are 1 in 3.87 including break-even prizes.

Sorry-storms tore down phone lines here in E. Texas and I'm on el cheapo dial-up. Yes, Alan, you are correct about the odds. On another spin-off, what would this do to the compulsive player who thinks that if he keeps on buying, or perhaps buys the rest of the roll, he HAS to win? Compare this to a machine that keeps on showing 3 A's and never hitting the 4th.

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Originally Posted by slingshot

Compare this to a machine that keeps on showing 3 A's and never hitting the 4th.

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That's a good question-- are the scratch off ticket odds comparable to video poker odds?
With a video poker machine you are playing with a random number generator and you might never get quad aces. But with lottery scratch offs, don't they know exactly how many winning combinations there are because the tickets are pre-printed? When I look at the various websites that the state lotteries have, they tell you how many jackpots are on a particular scratcher game. No video poker machine tells you how many royals will be hit.

Anyone care to comment and set me straight on this one??

A couple years ago, and I don't rememver if it was here in Illinois or in another state, there was a scratchoff that had only 1 or 2 winning tickets printed for the big prize. After that prize had been hit, they kept selling that scratch off ticket for months even though you couldn't win the prize anymore. People kept buying the tickets. Someone did file a lawsuit--I don't know the result.

In VP-obviously-you can win the big prize at any time. There is no limit based upon how many winning tickets were printed. So if the RNG is honest and in fact5 random, the fact that someone else won should not preclude anyone else from winning.

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Originally Posted by Alan Mendelson

No video poker machine tells you how many royals will be hit.

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True, but the odds are just a wee bit better. Take your California Fa$t Money game:
http://www.calottery.com/Play/Scratchers-games/$1-Scratchers/fas%24t-money-749
A buck a ticket, close to the $1.25 of a hand of quarter VP and with the same top prize; $1,000 We know its about 1 in 40,000 for the VP, for Fa$t Money it is 1 in 480,000.

Another thing to think about before investing your life savings in lottery tickets is that for every winner their has to be a greater amount of losers. So if you are playing a $10 game with a 1 million dollar prize there needs to be 100,000 losing tickets just to meet that one award, not even counting the other awards and the roughly 50% that the state takes.

I think most video poker games have a winning hand (and a winning hand can be a break even hand) between 35% and 45% of the time. It seems that the various scratchers have a winning hand (which can be a break even hand) about 29% of the time. Seems like video poker is the better gamble for percentage of winners.

One final humorous conclusion. I said that if they got another roll I would buy one ticket IF I won at the casinos and lo and behold good fortune shown on me and so I did what I said I was gonna do and got one. Well, halfway into the scratching, I uncovered the number 37 (LOL) and was kinda expecting the worst when the number 14 MATCHED! I had the unbelievable luck to.......WIN MY MONEY BACK! Ha ha. I can't leave without telling the name of the game-NUTCRACKER>Finally, a game that lives up to it's name!:cool::rolleyes:

I received $15 worth of California lottery tickets in a birthday card today. (I'm 61 but if you include all my spare parts my blended age is about 22.) Of the $15 worth of tickets, only one was a "winner" and it paid $2 which was double the cost of the ticket.