Excellent Some reflections on long odds and big payoffs Is There Magic In the Numbers of Lotto by RaymondJohn To all who bought PowerBall numbers tonight

Category:  Essay Fiction   Posted:  February 17, 2006      Views: 395

RAYMONDJOHN  IN PRINT   ABOUT RAYMONDJOHN  Raymond John is a hopeless FanStory addict who has at times spent as many as twelve hours in a single day reading, reviewing and writing for the site. His three purposes are based on three "Es" which are Explain, Enlighten and Entertain. His greatest fear is to take himself too seriously. He may not always smile, but he always has a twinkle in his eye. Knock his socks off with a fantastic write and he'll be your best cheerleader and give you a banner award, to boot. He has written two novels and numerous short works. His first book, The Cellini Masterpiece, has sold nearly 3,000 copies and received an Honorable Mention in the 2006 IPPY awards. It is now available in a Kindle edition from Amazon.com. An audio version (ISBN 9780615268125) is now available read by the renown actor, James Cada. MP3 edition, downloadable for IPOD, is 14.95. Order at www.raymondjohnbooks.com. His second mystery, Mix and Match Murder, which was originally scheduled for release in September of 2008 is now in print and available from Amazon.com, barnesandnoble.com and North Star Press. A scholar born in the golden age of radio, Raymond always appreciates hearing a well-told story, especially one with action and believable dialogue in a historical setting. I have written and received many reviews. I have a thick skin, so if constructive criticism is forthcoming, bring it on. He has won several contests. The contest submission Mousie, Kittie and Booger was the first place winner in the contest Tales of the Weird.. Gold In Them Thar Words was the first place winner in the contest Tales of the Weird.. Lot 386 was the first place winner in the contest Tales of the Weird.. He is a top ranked author and is currently holding the #22 position. Portfolio | Become A Fan Lottery games have been around for centuries. A variant of Bingo was invented in the late 1800s, but the Romans played the numbers long before that. The biggest difference between then and now is the cost to play the game and the size of the payoff for winning. Even the staunchest anti-gambling advocate has to admit to being intrigued by the prizes. By risking a dollar a person might win many millions. Unfortunately, as we all know, not everyone is willing to stop at a dollar. Horror stories, and hopefully mostly just stories, abound about welfare families spending their entire income buying tickets. Who have been the winners? Was it ever anyone who spent a hundred dollars or more on tickets to cut down the odds? I haven't heard of one, but I do know that a woman won forty million dollars when a clerk refused to change a five dollar bill for her so she could have bus fare. Determined to get her change, she bought a PowerBall ticket. (I hope she went back later and planted a big kiss on top of the curmudgeon's head.) Did any of the winners read a book telling them how to pick the numbers? How many used their own or their spouses' birthdate or the two combined? Or did they use their telephone number, or numbers from a fortune cookie? As far as I know, all but one of the winners let the lottery computer pick the numbers for them. The one great exception was famous. A man in Chicago faithfully bought the same numbers for the Illinois lottery at the same grocery store for years. One day the numbers came up. And guess what? He couldn't find his ticket! After learning about his history and considering the fact that no one else claimed the prize, the lottery commission magnaminously awarded the prize to him. It would be the first and last time it would ever happen. Now, you must present the winning ticket to claim your winnings. The point is, the odds against you are incredible. Imagine, if you will, a beach a hundred yards long by twenty yards wide with exactly one pebble that is different from all the rest. Even if it looks different, what do you think your chances are of finding it? So who cares, you say. I'll play anyway. Let's say you like to pick numbers. Which of the two listed below would you say is LESS likely to come up: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 or 22, 34, 39, 40, 46, 48 and 55. Niney-nine out of a hundred people would say 1, 2, 3, etc. is less likely because they are the first six numbers in our counting system and we imagine a connection between them. This imagined connection likely will translate into a bias against playing them. But the truth of the matter is, neither is more or less likely to occur than the other. The question is whether there is a practical aspect to this bias. Amazingly enough, there is. But it probably will take a very long time to show up. maybe even several billions of years. Sooner or later, over a infinitely long time span 1, 2, 3, etc. will wind up in the machine's trough. If the bias has continued, no one will have chosen the right numbers. (Never mind that the computer might have selected them for someone.) Put simply, over a long enough time span, even the tiniest bias can make an important difference. For the people who have bought books about picking winning numbers, how many authors claim they have a foolproof way of choosing the numbers? Obviously they don't, or hundreds of people would win every week. What they do say is that they can increase your odds of picking the right numbers. My question is, how do they know this is the case? Are the five non-winning numbers the book helped you find more likely to have been the winners than the millions of other combinations that didn't win either? If so, what is the process that determines these probablilities and how can it be demonstrated? In conclusion, let's return to the possible practical importance of even the tiniest biases. I have done studies of winning numbers for the PowerBall contest for the last ten years. (I'll let you research this for yourself.) Rather than evenly spread numbers across the complete range, certain ones have appeared significantly more often than others. Mathematicians who study probability theory say that this is a good proof of true randomness. Be that as it may, the question becomes: If a person played these numbers exclusively, would he/she be more likely to win? Probably not. Past performance cannot predict future occurrences. But even so, is there even a slightly greater probability that these numbers COULD actually come up more often in the future than some others? Possibly. The reason may lie in the mechanics of the way the numbers are chosen. The machine and the pingpong balls that bounce about before they blow out of the chute could contribute their own tiny bias. What if some of these balls were infinitesimally lighter or heavier than the rest? Or is it possible that the laws of randomness select certain numbers more often than others? We can never know. But even an infinitely tiny boost in your ability to predict one or two of the six numbers would cut down the odds against you by several millions. Is that tiny boost worth putting money on the line? That's entirely up to you. In a nutshell, a little research may actually reduce the multi-million odds against you by a tiniest bit. Who knows. It may be enough to help you pick a winner. Recognized Share your own writing! - Information on our membership for writers. Pays one point and 2 member cents.

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