Guess what will what's that mango? So in twenty twelve, this little farming village in Spain called Sedetto was struggling and there had been this downturn in the economy. There was also this massive drought and the town's homeowner association was running short on cash. But for some reason, they decided to spend what was left of their dues on the Christmas Lottery. I guess this is kind of a Spanish tradition and the whole country gets into it, but they bought tickets for the whole town.
Wow. Yeah, I've actually heard about the Christmas Lottery. I think we wrote about it a while back, and of
course it being such a big deal in Spain. I actually saw this one study where people were so optimistic around the time and the Christmas Lottery, Like, even though they know they're most likely not going to win, but that optimism actually changes their opinions of politicians, and so whoever's running for reelection at the time, even if they're overwhelmingly disliked, they end up getting this big bounce because of this.
Oh that's crazy. But going back to this town, they were actually really lucky. They played. The village won nine hundred fifty million dollars and it got split up among the town's seventy families. Yeah. So, like there were these unemployed construction workers, down on their luck farmers, and they all walked away like millionaires or at the very least one hundred thousand hoars. But everyone except one guy, that is. And he was this Greek gentleman who was down on
his luck. He'd moved to the town for a woman and they'd just broken up, and I guess he just wasn't interested in playing and losing money, so he didn't get to cash in.
Oh man, what a bummer. So he's the only one who didn't participate.
Yeah, I mean, things ended up kind of all right for him. Like he'd been trying to sell his barn there, and before the lottery, no one had money to buy it. But once they did, suddenly everyone was clamoring to purchase his barn, so he ended up with a real estate deal. But today's show is all about the lottery. How do statisticians outfox the system?
And why should you care.
If you find Herbert Hoover on your lotto ticket? So let's dive in.
Hey, their podcast listeners, welcome to part time genius. I'm Will Pearson and as always I'm joined by my good friend Mangesh how Ticketer and on the other side of the soundproof glass, hunched over the fattest stack of Georgia a lotto scratchers I think I've ever seen. I feel like he might have bought all of them, Mango. But that's our friend and producer Tristan McNeil. You know the other thing, I've noticed, this guy loves scratching these things, Mango. Have you been watching him over here?
Yeah, he actually is using this special scratch off tool. It's shaped like a little ice craper, but it goes on your key ring. I think he got it off, Etsy, but I think he has it just in case of a lot of emergencies.
Well, you never know what's going to happen, and I do wish you luck, Tristan. But the truth is, winning the lottery is a universally accepted long shot. It's up there with being struck by lightning or crushed by a meteor, except in the case of winning the lotto, your odds are actually much much worse, you know. Yet despite that, despite knowing, the odds are ridiculously long millions of people around the world will still pony up for lotteries every
single year. So with that in mind, we thought it'd be interesting to explore the psychology behind why people play the lottery, including how playing changes lives. Plus along the way, we'll check out the stories of a few enterprising gamblers who found pretty clever ways to game the system and beat those odds. But before we get to that, I know you did some digging this week into the history of lottery, so can you fill us in just a little bit on that before we get to anything else.
Yeah, So, what's crazy is that lotteries are basically as old as arithmetic, and you can actually find stories of lotteries in the Bible. In fact, the first lotteries weren't really about winning prize money like in the Old Testament. There are all these references to land lotteries, and Moses actually used one to divvy up portions of the promised
land along the Jordan River. Er think this worked similar to how we play powerball, Like the tribes of Israel would have each taken a differently shaped or marked stone and dropped it into a clay pot or maybe wrapped it up in a piece of cloth and then they would have shaken up all the stones and drawn one
for each piece of land on the docket. But ancient lotteries also had these other uses, Like in the sixth century BC, Athenians chose most of their government officials through sortition, which is actually a term for when political representatives are selected at random by people casting or drawing lots.
Which seems like a weird fit for that to have been in Athens. I mean, like it wasn't Athens like the birthplace of democracy.
Yeah, And that's actually the thing, Like the Athenians actually viewed the lottery as more democratic than elections, and they're thinking was that, you know, politicians or wealthy citizens could easily rig the outcomes of elections, and to them, sortians just seemed like the safer option. So while Athens did hold elections for a few positions, the bulk of the
appointments were simply left to chance. And the way it worked was that any free men over the age of eighteen was entered into a lottery, and if their name was drawn, they would either be assigned a term as a juror or as a member of the citizen council.
I'm curious, So, like, how exactly did they run this lottery? It sounds like they were trying to sort through and pick from a lot of people, right.
Yeah, And it wasn't done powerball style. They actually had a special device called a claritarian. It's to help ensure that the draws were as random as possible. And it was basically this massive stone slab and it had these tiny slots in it for putting tokens in, and each token identified a different person in the lottery. And then they had this long tube connected to the side of the slab, and when officials poured a bunch of black and white pebbles into the tube, I mean, this is ingenious.
The pebbles would just scatter across the slab and land on different tokens, and that indicated who would receive physicians and who would be dismissed. And I don't know, it kind of feels like something out of the Flintstones.
Price is right, that's pretty great, you know. Actually, lotteries are so much more on when they include these weird gadgets or honestly, these like overly complicated systems for choosing their winners and just in doing your other digging. Did you find any other early examples of weirdness like this?
Yeah? I mean, I think you would have liked the lottery style game that they played in China during the Han dynasty. It was typically played on I guess a white ticket and players would select like a series of numbers of characters, and if their picks were chosen in the random drawing, then they'd be senter prize. But this is where it gets special, right, because how do you communicate the winning numbers when all your players are spread out across a bunch of rural villages?
All right, well, we're talking ancient China, So I'm going to go with I don't know, like a fireworks display or something.
I mean, that would be so fun, right to watch these fireworks sort of reveal the answers. But fireworks were still a few centuries away at this point, so instead, these Chinese governments used birds to deliver the results to villages, Like they had a whole fleet of carrier pigeons that would carry the results from village to village, and then
they'd also collect the winning tickets along the way. And in fact, this is actually where the game got its original name, bige Po I know I'm pronouncing that wrong, but roughly translated, it's called a white pigeon ticket.
I mean, that's pretty cool. So do people still play this white pigeon ticket game today?
They do, except now the game has been rebranded as Keino. They've I guess stripped the pigeons out of the game, which feels like a major loss to me.
That's a huge mistake.
Yeah, but Quino is still a huge money maker for casinos. Even two thousand years ago, the game was this big financial windfall for China. It was supposedly invented by a warlord who's named Chung Lun. He'd been looking for a way to get citizens to help fund his army, and selling those white pigeon tickets proved a great way to
do just that. Pretty soon the game was being used to fund not just the military, but all sorts of other public works projects, and in fact, one version of the game supposedly helped pay for the Great Wall of China.
You know, that was one of the surprising things as we were doing our research for this week, was realizing how many of these huge projects were funded by lotteries. I was actually reading just recently about colonial America and that it was largely built using revenue from lotteries. Like apparently lotteries had made their way to America shores. I think it was back in the sixteenth century. And this was really around the same time that they were catching
on in Europe. So I guess in places like Italy and France and England, they'd all borrowed a page from China's playbook because they realized that lotteries were a smart way to raise money for these various civic projects. And so it's kind of crazy how early it was being used in America too. You look back around sixteen twelve, you had the Virginia Company of London that actually held a lottery to support the struggling Jamestown colony and really
used it to save the settlers there from starvation. But it was used in these other pitole moments too, like you know, seventeen seventy six you had the Constitutional Congress holding a lottery to finance soldiers for the Revolutionary Wars or and then even after the war was won, the New States relied on these lotteries for much more of their revenue. And you know, after all, unfair taxation had been a big part of the war. So you can see why this alternative way to raise money was so
appealing to politicians. It was, you know, just so much easier than creating a new tax.
I mean, it's funny because people often refer to the lottery as, I don't know, like a voluntary tax.
Yeah, and you know, that's actually how one of the founding fathers felt about lotteries too. And I'm talking about Thomas Jefferson here, and he wrote a good bit about it. So once he wrote about it, he said, far from being immoral, they are indispensable to the existence of man. Their attacks laid on the willing only. Of course, Jefferson was more than a little bit biased in this situation. I mean that quote comes from a letter that he
was writing to the Virginia legislature. And he was writing this because he was looking for permission to hold his own lottery. And I was actually looking into why he was doing this, and the whole reason he wanted to do it was to pay off some of his debts. It's pretty pretty fun.
That's pretty amazing.
Yeah, But you know what's weird is that there's this whole idea that lotteries are really kind of this voluntary tax, right, Like, it's only a tax if you're willing to buy in. But there's actually pretty strong evidence that suggests that longtime lotto players are induced to play a game that maybe they otherwise wouldn't.
So explain that a little like, what do you mean by that?
All right, Well, it might be helpful just to give a little bit of background on who's playing the lottery. So I was looking at this information from Gallup, and it was showing that nearly half of all US adults have played a state lottery at least once in their lives.
That's not that surprising. But then if you look a little bit closer, the vast majority of those tickets are bought by just twenty percent of the population, And as you might guess, most of those players who make up that twenty percent are actually among the poorest in the country. In fact, according to a study from Duke this was done back in the nineteen eighties, the poorest third of American households by roughly half of the lottery tickets that
are sold. There's more recent data, and this is what's even more disturbing, is that on average, households that make less than twelve thousand dollars a year spend a full five percent of their incomes on lotteries. Five percent of their incomes on lotteries. It's pretty tragic to see that.
That's horrifying. So, I mean, there are so many things that work against the poor. Like I was reading about I'm pretty sure it was Chicago, but it was about parking tickets, where if you get a ticket and you don't pay in time, the price automatically skyrockets, and if you can't pay that, they boot your car or take away your license, which then makes it harder to get to your job to pay that ticket. And that's actually
been driving a ton of bankruptcies in the city. I mean, I guess if you're desperate and you're looking for a fast fix for your financial troubles, like playing the lottery seems like the quickest way out. At least that's how I think about it. But it sounds like you're saying it's more than that, Like these people are actually being misled or maybe duped or something.
Yeah, and you know, this actually goes back to a two thousand and eight study. You like the number of studies I'm quoting today. I'm just breathed on. All these studies came armed with them. But this was a group of behavioral economists there at Carnegie Mellon, and so what they were looking to is, is it really like the reason why poor people are so much more likely to
play the lottery than those who are better off? And what they found was that a lot of the desire that drives these low income players isn't so much from being poor as it is from feeling poor. So here's how the studies authors broke down their findings. It says in experiment one, participants were more likely to purchase lottery tickets when they were primed to perceive that their own
income was low relative to the implicit standard. And then an experiment too, participants purchased more lottery tickets when they considered non lottery situations in which rich people or poor people receive advantages, implicitly highlighting the fact that everyone has an equal chance of winning the lottery.
So basically, when you make people feel poor, they play the lottery more. And when they feel like it's equal like, then they want to put money on it because they feel like it's a fair game. I mean, it's kind of heartbreaking when you think about how low their chances of winning actually are though.
Right, Yeah, And I actually found yet another study, and this comes from the late eighties.
Justly have studies.
I'm coming with, so many of them have almost as many studies as Tristan has scratch off tickets. Not quite anyway, this one's a good one too. So this was also in the late eighties, and the researchers discovered that lottery ticket sales in California, they rise along with the poverty rate, but movie ticket sales actually don't. And so what that says is that people don't just play the lottery for fun.
They're playing it out of desperation. So, you know, all too often the lottery becomes a way for states to shift the cost of government services from, you know, from the wealthier citizens onto honestly like the most hopeless ones.
All right, Well, now that you've got us all righteously indignant about the lottery, here's what I want to talk about. Nerdy geniuses who out fox the system and made a lot of payout big time.
All right, that sounds like a good idea. But before we do that, let's take a quick break. You're listening to part time genius. So we're talking about some of the most brazen lottery scams in history. All right, mego, So let's live vicariously for a minute through some of these lotto legends. So who do you want to talk about? First?
Okay? So first I've got to tell you about Mohen sivas the He is this MIT trained statistician who actually found a flaw in a certain scratch off game from the Ontario Lottery and this effectively allowed him to predict winning cards about ninety percent.
Of the time. Oh wow, So what's his story?
So Mowen wasn't really interested in playing the lotto, much less exploiting it. But one day, and this was back in two thousand and three, he found some old scratch offs on his desks that have been part of this gag gift I guess someone gave him, and on a whim,
he scratched off one and won three dollars. So he's walking to cash in his ticket on his lunch break, and as he's thinking about it, he started thinking about how scratch offs must be made right, and it dawned on him that the tickets are obviously mass produced, which means that a computer program must be involved in laying out the numbers on each ticket.
Yeah, I get that, But it's all random, isn't it. Like that's probably another reason ticket makers use a computer, because there's no way a human could actually design that many tickets and still keep the numbering completely random, right, Sure?
But Moan realized that the computers can't be generating truly random numbers either. Like if they were, though, I mean, the lottery company had no control over the actual number of winning tickets produced, and if that were the case, it would mean that some ticket packets would have very few winners or maybe even none at all. And obviously it would be tough to get retailers and also players to keep buying those tickets if so many of those cards were duds.
Okay, that makes sense. So if the tickets like they can kind of have to have the illusion of randomness while actually being incredibly ordered beneath the surface, is that what you're saying exactly?
And once Moan figured this out, he decided to try and crack the algorithm that generated all those numbers, you know, just for fun, because he was from MIT and a statistician, right, so he sat down to study this one tic TAC toe scratch off game he'd been playing, and after just a few hours he discovered that the visible numbers on the ticket actually dictated which digits were hidden under the
latex coding. So basically, every ticket had like eight tic tac toe game boards on it, and each board would contain some visible numbers. But if you look to see how many times those numbers repeated on the card, and mostly it was if a number was a singleton and not repeating, you could actually tell which cards were winners, and the prize money could be anywhere between three dollars and fifty thousand dollars.
Okay, all right, I mean, I know it all sounds complicated, But what I find so fascinating about this is, as you're saying, Mohen basically found a way to determine if a ticket was a winner without having to scratch anything off, right, And you're saying he got this trick to work like ninety percent of the time, the guy must have made a fortune.
So that's the weirdest part. Moon really did this for the love of math and not money. In fact, once he was sure his technique worked, he actually contacted the Ontario Lottery Gaming Corporation and told him about the flaw he'd found. And it's funny because he told NPR that he was playing telephone tag with lottery, and when they finally got to talk to one another, they kind of didn't believe him. So he sent them twenty unscratched cards and separated them into what he thought would be winning
cards and duds. And when they scratched them off and realized he predicted correctly, that's when they called him back.
Oh man, I bet he felt pretty awesome. That's pretty wild.
Yeah, I mean, he later discovered the problem wasn't exclusive to Ontario. I mean, it kind of makes sense, right. It turned out the same trick was also being employed in Colorado, though when he analyzed those cards, he could only figure him out with seventy percent accuracy.
And that's still pretty impressive. I mean, you know, as nice as it was for Mowen to come clean about his discovery, I feel like that's certainly not how most attempts to game the lottery turnout. And I was just looking at some other cases, you know, if you take the case of Jerry and Marge Selby, for instance, and this comes from this great story by Jason FAGONI and we actually had Jason on the program earlier this year to talk about his book. It was called The Woman Who Smashed Codes.
I mean, that was honestly one of my favorite episodes. Is so fascinating, and my mom just bought that book because she loved Jason so much. But tell me about the Selby's.
All right, So they're from Michigan and they were basically among the first players to find a flaw in a state lottery game. The game was called Windfall, and this was back in two thousand and three, and it came down to this unique quirk and wind falls rules, namely, whenever the jackpot would rise to roughly two million dollars or so without anybody winning it, the payoffs for smaller
prizes increased dramatically. So basically, if a player waited until this so called roll down period, which typically lasted for a few days every three months or so, they would stay to win more than they lost. Then. Of course, this is on average, and so if they were to buy an especially high number of tickets during that rolldown, say like you know, one hundred thousand dollars worth, then they would be practically guaranteed to turn a ten to fifteen percent profit.
Okay, So the more tickets a player buys during the special period, the more money they're kind of assured to win. So I'm curious how many tickets did Jerry and March go in on.
It was unbelievable, the number of tickets. I mean, they basically treated Windfall like their retirement plan, and they played for the better part of a decade. In fact, Michigan retired the game, only for Massachusetts to roll out their own versions soon after, and so the Selby's actually took
their ticket buying operation on the road. What they would do is they just pile into their truck, they'd drive the twelve hours or so to Massachusetts, and then they'd set up shop in two separate convenience stores, printing ream after ream of tickets for honestly, for hours at a time.
So I've been stuck in bodegos behind people playing the lotto, and it's so frustrating, Like you can be there for like ten minutes or fifteen minutes. It can take forever when you're in a rush. But how many tickets are we actually talking about here?
You are not going to believe this. So, at the height of their scheme. The couple was spending over six hundred thousand dollars on a single play of Windfall. Keep this in mind, we're talking two dollars a pop here, so that means they had more than three hundred thousand tickets that week.
That's insane. So I'm always nervous when I see people gambling and gambling with such ridiculous amounts of money, like, I'm so afraid they're gonna lose it. And you know, my favorite thing to do in Las Vegas is to go up to an ATM and act like I've won when it spits out cash, because I do not want to get ripped off by machines. But obviously these people are made of much stronger stuff than I am. So how much did they end up making?
Well, the Selby's actually didn't play alone, at least not the whole time. There was one point where they started this company called GS Investment Strategies. I love that that's the name of their company for some reason, firm I know. So basically, it was a betting group that consisted of the Selby's and their extended family and friends. And just looking at the you know the list of people in
this it's pretty funny. It included a state trooper, a parole officer, three lawyers, among all these others that were playing, and at their final tally, they managed to get almost eight million dollars. It was just shy of eight million dollars before taxes, and of course all that was divvied up among the company's twenty five players. So really not a bad haul for nine years of printing out these slips of paper. But you know it, actually it was a little bit short of what this small group of
MIT students managed to win. And this was off the very same game. This was between two thousand and four and twenty ten. The students made actually just a little bit over eight million dollars in profit.
So I've still kind of blown away that this happened. I mean, like, why didn't the lottery commissions of these states wise up to what was happening. You've got these multiple groups of people pulling off the same scheme for like a decade and obviously buying massive amounts of tickets.
Well, I mean, this may be the weirdest part of all of this is that somebody did notice, and this was in twenty twelve. There was an investigation into the Windfall Game, and that investigation revealed that the Massachusetts Lottery had known all about the MIT students and the Selby's
per years. What has actually done nothing to stop them. Apparently, lottery officials had been the rules so that the high stakes players could buy hundreds of thousands of tickets because you know, the added revenue and the success this brought to the lottery and of course by extension to the state,
they just considered it worth it. But you know, in the end, even though none of this was technically illegal, the state Treasurer who oversees the lottery, they officially shut down the wind Fall Game in twenty twelve, and of course this put an end to the player's long winning streak at that point.
Yeah, but I mean they made eight million dollars on it, so it's not that bad.
Yeah, it is saying.
That they figure this out, but it also seems to suggest that, like once you find a game that's beatable, you need lots of money to win, right, Like these MIT students, the Selby's, they all had the resources to buy up hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of tickets, which is what allowed them to win as often as they did. Meanwhile, you know, the people who couldn't afford enough tickets to gain that statistical advantage, they're kind of shut out. And not only that, but it's really the
poor folks money that's going to all the payouts. You know that said, I mean, I don't want to give the impression that lotteries are zero sum game for society, Like like we were saying at the top of the show. You know, countries have been putting lottery revenue to good use for centuries, and that's still true today. So even if you feel squeamish about who these games might be targeting, like I do, it's still worth taking a look at the benefits that come from them.
Yeah, I agree with that. But but before we get to that, let's take one more quick break. All right, Mango, So cluisen, where exactly does all this lottery money go?
Well, first, let's clarify how much money we're talking about here. So when you actually add up all the revenue from the modern US lottery industry, all the sales you know, from cash drawings, the instant win scratch offs, video lottery games, keino like, you wind up with a yearly total of eighty billion dollars.
Oh my god, that's stunning.
And just to put that in perspective, movie ticket sales in the US add up to only about eleven billion dollars annually. In fact, that eighty billion is more than American spend every year, not only on movie tickets, but also on sports tickets, books, video games, music sales, all that combined.
That's crazy, all right. So obviously we love to gamble, and that must mean that we're getting something out of the deal, right though, So how much of that eighty billion ends up in the player's pockets.
It's way more than you think. Like, I was actually surprised to hear this, but over fifty billion of that tot goes to players in the former prizes.
Oh yeah, I wouldn't have guessed that.
Yeah, And then another eight billion is used to cover the cost of the lotteries themselves, So like this is the boring stuff like printing, advertising, design, employee salaries, vendor fees. But the remaining twenty two billion, which you know is still a ton of money, is funneled into public programs, and that includes everything from education and land conservation to senior assistants and even pension funds.
Well, and obviously different states will claim different amounts of that profit depending on their individual sales numbers, but it's up to each state to decide what to do with their profits.
Yeah, that's right. So there are currently lotteries and forty seven different US jurisdictions, which includes forty four states plus dc is on their Puerto Rico the virgin Islands, and they each get to use their money for whatever they want.
So education budgets are probably the most popular choice, Like the Virginia lottery, for example, it actually puts all of its profits into a K to twelve education fund, and last year our lottery right here in Georgia actually gave out a billion dollars in profits to education programs compared to the two point seven billion it gave out in prizes to players.
Wow, Army, you know, there's no denying that state run lotteries can deliver pretty big benefits to their citizens, at least generally speaking, and again, it's easy to see why most politicians would want to keep that easy money flowing through their states.
Sure, But on a different note, one of the things that's really fun to hear about is the individual lottery winners who actually share their wealth. And I was reading about this guy named John Coody who split a three hundred and twenty million dollar payout with six other IT specialists, and this was back in twenty eleven.
I mean, that sounds nice, but you're saying seven IT guys won that jack. But I feel like that has to be some kind of fix, like with the MIT students, right.
Yeah, I mean that's possible, but considering what Coody did with his money, like, I wouldn't hold it against him. He and his wife actually decided to use a good chunk of their winnings to build this massive water park the community. And this was in Green Island, New York. They called it Spray Park, and it's dedicated to Coody's parents, who apparently used to take their kids into this I guess outdated water park in the community, and that's the one he helped replace.
That's pretty sweet, and I do love these kinds of stories. I was actually reading about another lot of winning couple. They were named Alan and Violet Large, and they went about eleven million dollars back in twenty ten, and they ended up giving away ninety eight percent of it within the first year. Is that not crazy?
Yeah, I mean, ninety eight percent is a lot of percent. So where did that money go?
Well, according to an article in the Toronto Star, the couple donated nearly all of their winnings to the Red Cross, to their local churches, fire departments, and even the hospitals where Violet had undergone cancer treatment. And of course, while parting with that much loud is painful for you know, so many of us to even think about, it was apparently pretty easy for the Larges. There was this interview I was looking at where Violet told reporters what you've never had, you never miss I mean.
It really is amazing to see people react to newfound wealth so humbly like that. Speaking of humility, did you hear about this homeless guy in Illinois who won fifty thousand dollars on a scratcher? No, apparently he'd lived in a tent in a homeless community for like thirty five years at this point, and that's when he won the money. But rather than leave his friends for a comfy home of his own, he decided to stay right where he was.
Wait, so he just stayed in his tent.
Yeah. He told reporters that he planned to use the money for an overdue trip to the dentist, and he also wanted to use some of the money to visit his son. But then he gave one hundred dollars to every homeless person he knew, and I'm guessing he knew a lot of them.
Wow. All right, so this is kind of a tangent, but you made me think of it when you brought up scratchers again. And we've been talking about the bright side of playing the lottery throughout this segment. But there's actually a way to get enjoyment from lotteries without playing them, and the best part is it won't cost you a dime. So what's the catch, Actually, there's no catch. All you
have to do is become a latologist. If by some chance you don't already know what a litologist is, I can tell you that it's a person who collects lottery tickets.
So how does that cost no money?
Well, because it's a collecting hobby, it's not a gambling hobby. So most litologists don't collect fresh or unused scratch cards. They're actually collecting losing tickets or maybe even winners tickets that have already been redeemed by the customers.
So how many litologists are there? I feel like you keep saying they, but to me it feels like one person in his bearent's basement.
Well, according to the Global Lottery Collectors Society. You may not have been familiar with the Global Lottery Collectors Society, there was a group of a few hundred passionate collectors who trade and catalog all these various scratch off games released in the US. And this one guy in particular, his name is Arthur Rain, and he has one of the biggest collections in the world. He's got over fifty seven thousand different scratchers in his collection.
So that's pretty crazy. But I did notice you said one of the biggest, So what's that mean exact.
Well, apparently there are one or two other people in the society with bigger collections, which I know is pretty hard to believe.
So I'm curious, now, is there a holy grail for littologists? Like, is there one special scratch off that everyone would spend money on?
Yeah, there definitely is. According to Rain, the most sought after scratcher is this nineteen seventy six card and it was from Illinois and it has Herbert Hoover's picture on it. Apparently it was part of a promotion where each ticket featured a different president, and once the game was over, the lottery picked one president, and anybody who submitted a losing ticket with that president's face on it would be
entered to win a consolation prize. Well, Herbert Hoover ended up as the lucky President, and because so many players mailed him in, there aren't many Hoovers left in circulation. In fact, if you're lucky to find one of the three or four copies known to exist and you want to add it to your collection, it'll set you back about five hundred bucks to do so.
I love that it's only worth five hundred dollars, but I mean it is a forty year old losing lottery ticket. Yeah, but I am curious, though, if the Hoover card is this exception to the rule, how are littologists getting the bulk of their collections. I mean, I get that they trade with each other, but they've got to start out with something to trade, right.
Yeah, of course that's true. I mean, so many collectors actually have deals with a whole network of stores, so they'll you know, make their rounds once a week or so and they'll collect all the used tickets that a store's customers just left behind.
It's such a specific hobby. It amazing.
You know.
It kind of reminds me of our friend Sarah, who used to find business cards on sidewalks or I guess that convention floors and collect them. And I think her big idea was that someday she was going to throw a party for all these people who wanted a network and get their name out there.
But I mean it's a great idea.
I know, I think it's great. Like I love to I should start leaving my business card places, but at least like a business card has value. I can't imagine keeping fifty thousand of anything in my house. You know, where do you even find the room for that?
Well, that's what's funny about I read this interview with Rain from Atlas Obscura. In it, he says, I gotta beg my wife every day not to throw me out of the house.
So I mean, i'd say the fact that it hasn't happened already makes them pretty lucky. And speaking of lucky, what do you say we get a little fact off going. I've got a can't lose feeling today.
All right, well, let's see what you got.
So well, did you know that pigeons love to gamble? According to scientific American scientists at the University of Kentucky set up these Avian gambling parlors where pigeons could peck at one symbol and reliably get a single food pellet, and this happened every single time. Or they had the option to peck at a second symbol, and this was a wild card, and most of the times they'd get nothing, but every once in a while they'd hit the jackpot and they'd get ten food pellets. But that big pay
was actually way too much for them to resist. So whenever they were given a choice, the pigeons chose to gamble. And this was more than eighty percent at a time, even though the winnings were way less when you average.
Them out, that's pretty good, all right. Well, in Europe and particularly Italy, there's a tradition where the lottery is drawn by blindfolded kids, which seems like kind of a weird tradition. And the idea here is that children are innocent, so this is a game you can supposedly trust. Although I feel like there have been so many studies showing that children are not at all honest on this kind
of thing. But anyway, but this was before things were automated, back in the two thousands, and as it turns out, not surprisingly, the kids were part of a massive scam. They'd actually been trained to feel for these roughed up lottery balls, and when the journalists who broke the scandal started looking into this, they found that the kids were being paid in toys.
So I love the idea that like you can actually fix a multimillion lottery with I don't know, like some is in an erector set.
It's politics, that's all it.
Tics Did you realize that it's way harder to win McDonald's monopoly game than it is to win actual lottery And apparently the odds of winning power Ball are one in one hundred and seventy five million, So already you're more likely to die on the way to playing a lot of than you are to winning it. But that one in one hundred and seventy five million is great odds compared to the odds of finding a boardwalk piece,
which is one in six hundred million. And when you factor in also finding a park place, your odds of winning go down to one in three billion, isn't that the same?
Wow, that's pretty great, all right. Well, in nineteen twelve, Popular Mechanics reported that a hospital in Paris had held a lottery, but they actually were giving out something a little different than money. They were giving out babies, Like if you won, you won a baby, which is I don't know. It feels like kind of a dubious prize for a lot of people, but it's the only time
we know of that this has happened. But the hospital they not only consulted authorities, but they actually made sure to research whether a winning was actually good to be foster parents before they handed them a baby.
I guess that sounds smart. So this feels like such luck. But when Zimbabwe ran a lottery in two thousand, the dictator and president of Zimbabwe at the time, Robert Mugabe, just happened to win it, like he won the grand prize of one hundred thousand dollars in the state run lottery. And it's kind of amazing how that happened.
Yeah, just such a lucky guy, I guess. All right, all right, so I've got one more fun one. So you remember how there were all those voltswaggon commercials that were trying to gamify good behavior a while back, right, yeah,
in the two thousands. Yeah, yeah, like they you know, they made those trash cans that would blink and flash whenever you put your litter in them, and I remember one of the others they had those musical steps that made sounds when you use them instead of the elevator, And it was all these little bits of joy that were there to encourage you to do good things, either for you or for society. One of the ideas that actually got implemented in Sweden was when they set up
the lottery at traffic lights. So you know when you run a red light, there are all these places where cameras will catch you and then send you a ticket and the mail. Well, well they actually turn that into a lottery for good drivers. So whenever you slowed down and stopped, you were automatically put into a lottery, and then the winners were paid out with money that came from speeding fines. Isn't that a great idea?
I love it, you know, for all my hubers going into this, I do think you get to walk away with the prize this week.
Well, Thank you very much, and I'm sure we forgot some great facts about lotteries over the years and we would love to hear those from. You can always email us part Time Genius at HowStuffWorks dot com. You can also call us on our twenty four to seven fact hotline that's eight six six pt Genius, or as always, you can hit us up on Facebook or Twitter. But
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