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A hope and a prayer for some fame and fortune
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Location: Blogs Sly Comments |
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| Posted by: Emory Schley |
4/11/2007 5:57 AM |
I’ve been playing the Florida Lotto since the day of the very first drawing. I used to buy one or two tickets each week back when it was just a weekly event. Then later it went to twice each week. So I played twice each week for awhile before deciding that I was just throwing good money after bad. I didn’t want to quit buying tickets altogether, I just wanted to cut down on the expenses a bit.
So I came up with a scheme whereby I would only buy tickets when the jackpot rose to $10 million or more. And that’s the way I’ve been doing it for a number of years now. For a long time, I kept playing the same numbers each week. They were the numbers that represented our birthdays, my wife’s and mine, that is. Once in a very great while, like about once every six months or so, I would succeed in matching three of my numbers with the winning numbers for that week. I usually got $5 for my reward, but sometimes it was as low as $3.50. Only one time in all those years have I ever matched four numbers, and that earned me a lofty $65.
I was doing so poorly with the birthday numbers, and this was after a number of years of playing, that I decided to just switch over to Quick Picks, letting the computer choose randomly for me. I thought choosing random numbers each time might increase my odds of winning, because there obviously were many combinations I wasn’t using at all, when I restricted myself to the birthday numbers. At the very least, I thought, Quick Picks can’t do any worse than I had been doing in choosing winning numbers.
Now after several years of letting the computer do the hard work for me, I have reluctantly come to the conclusion that I was probably doing better, much better, with the birthday numbers than I do now. For the past few years, my winnings work out to be about an annual event, even though I’m probably buying more tickets now than I did before.
One thing that has intrigued me about the Lotto, and I really wish I knew how to figure the odds on this, but it seems that a particular situation arises fairly frequently: I will have two winning numbers, and one of my remaining numbers will miss one of the remaining winning numbers by just one digit. For example, I might have 2, 11 and 14 among my numbers; and the winning numbers will include 2, 11, and 15 (or 13). Missing by just one digit always gives me a bit of a moral boost, making me think I’ve come really close to a win – and this inspires me to buy more tickets. However, this has happened so frequently, I’m starting to suspect it must be a fairly common situation. Guys who know how to figure odds in a situation like this have a decided advantage over the rest of us poor, dumb mortals.
I’ve thought a number of times that I should just take the money I spend on the Lotto and stick it in my piggy bank instead, but I never spend enough to impact my financial responsibilities, and I consider playing numbers to be recreational in nature. I have a lot of other hobbies that I’ll never make a dime from, so I guess the Lotto is not so bad after all.
Probably the thought that keeps me playing the most is the realization that even though the chances of winning big are pretty astronomical, I do know that the only way to guarantee not EVER hitting it big in the Lotto, is to just not play at all! |
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