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Elderly
Couple Games Lottery, Wins
Millions
Published August 01, 2011
Sometimes
you have to make your own
luck.
An
elderly couple stands to make
millions of dollars after purchasing more than $600,000 worth of
lottery
tickets over a three-day period, according to a report by the Boston
Globe.
Marjorie
and Gerald Selbee, both in
their 70s, each bought $307,000 worth of $2 tickets for a relatively
obscure
Massachusetts lottery called Cash WinFall. One location that sold them
half the
tickets, Billy’s Beer and Wine, had sold only $47 worth of lottery
tickets the
day before.
The
Selbees are among a small group of
gamblers -- including statisticians and engineers from MIT and
Northwestern
University -- who were able to exploit a lottery loophole providing
them with
risk-free winnings. The Selbees have already claimed nearly $1 million
in prize
money this year.
And
that’s just the tip of the
iceberg, according to Mohan Srivastava, an MIT-educated statistician
who gained
fame when he found a flaw in a Canadian scratch ticket game that
allowed him to
pick the winners more than 90 percent of the time
“Cash
WinFall isn’t being played as a
game of chance. Some smart people have figured out how to get rich
while
everyone else funds their winnings,” Srivastava told the Boston Globe.
According
to Srivastava, because of
the way Cash WinFall is setup, a gambler who bought 200,000 tickets
during a
special four-week period would not only cover his investment, but also
make
anywhere from $240,000 to $1.4 million in guaranteed profit. All in
all,
Srivastava calculates the top five groups and individuals playing Cash
WinFall
collectively win $1 million to $6 million in profits every year from
less than
two weeks of gambling, the Globe reported.
How
it Works
The
secret is timing.
The
game itself is simple: If the
numbers on six randomly selected balls match the ones on your ticket,
you win
the jackpot -- which only one person has ever won since the game’s
creation in
2004.
The
jackpot grows slowly over time
from a low of $500,000 to a limit of $2 million to $2.5 million. When
the limit
is reached and no one has won, the jackpot is redistributed across the
smaller
prizes for those who matched three, four or five numbers correctly.
See
Also: Statistician Cracks Secret
Code Behind Lottery Tickets
When
these “rolldowns” occur, the odds
of a significant payout increase dramatically.
According
to Mark Kon, a professor of
math and statistics at Boston University, the trick only works if you
buy
enough tickets. Someone who buys $100,000 worth of tickets has a 74
percent
chance of winning during the rolldown week; for bettors like Selbee who
spend
at least $500,000, there is nearly no risk of losing money, Kon told
the Boston
Globe.
But
Paul Sternburg, the lottery’s
executive director, believes they have no reason to apologize or even
change
the lottery’s procedures -- pointing to $11.8 million in profits in
2011.
“It’s
a niche game for a different
audience,” he told the Boston Globe. “You want to bring in as many
players as
possible. Some people chase a huge jackpot. Others are looking at odds.”
For
more savvy players -- including an
engineer from MIT -- who have bested the lottery, see the full story on
The
Boston Globe.
Read
it at FoxNews...
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