Posted on 02/04/2018 9:42:39 AM PST by Loud Mime
Pennsylvania's Auditor General says that he has full confidence in the integrity of the Pennsylvania Lottery following a review in response to a PennLive investigation in 2017 that found some Pennsylvanians have claimed lottery tickets with seemingly improbable frequency.
In an interview Monday, Eugene DePasquale said he met with lottery officials and was given a thorough tour of its operations and an explanation of its security procedures.
DePasquale added that the lottery told him it had investigated the most frequent claimants PennLive identified and found no wrongdoing.
"I have a high degree of confidence from the beginning of the system to the end that it's a clean system," DePasquale said.
But statisticians consulted by PennLive said that many of the winning patterns PennLive identified remain improbable, raising questions about the thoroughness of the review.
PennLive's series, Defying the Odds, found that Pennsylvania's most frequent winner, Nadine Vukovich, claimed 209 prizes from instant tickets worth $600 or more between 2004 and 2016, winning $348,000.
(more at the link)
Is Nick Perry still around?
Winning $600 or more in a scratch-off is extremely rare...one such ticket in several hundred thousand for a $1 ticket; one in almost 3000 for a $20 ticket....I think ArtDodger’s theory makes a lot of sense.
https://www.palottery.state.pa.us/uploadedfiles/PA-1264%20DATA.pdf
https://www.palottery.state.pa.us/uploadedfiles/PA-1265%20DATA.pdf
I missed jjotto’s comment; I was unaware of that.
Hmm....it seems you’d have to have some inside information then....which stores were the big winning tickets sent to, and when?
I know in Mass you can find out how many “big” scratch tickets are left in a series. Some players focus on those tickets.
It’s not brain surgery. But the odds are still pretty long.
Oh, because Texas is so experienced with making it on your own.
You guys fold up like a card table when you get a little rain. Try getting 24 inches of snow some weekend.
Have you noticed that the machine makes a loud noise and flashes the winning amount. Plus on scratch tickets you know how much you’ve won. Nice theory, but trust me...the old people that play the lottery know what’s going on. Those folks are hard core.
8 years after Nick Perry was this scam:
http://www.nytimes.com/1988/05/04/us/2-charged-in-rigging-of-lottery.html
Hmmm....maybe there’s a pattern to the winning tickets.
So if a $100 prize is sold at a given store, you know that the $600 and above prizes won’t be sold there.
That’s just a guess on my part...
Otherwise jjotto’s theory is right.
I like snow.. go skiing every year ;^)
I’ve seen clickbait ads that claim to reveal the methodology. I’m not clicking on them, though. I prefer the old-fashioned Nick Perry inject-the-balls-with-paint method of messing with the odds.
There are a lot of good self sufficient country people in the NE. That’s why Trump won the election
I haven’t bought a scratch-off in a long time, but as I recall , back in the day, there was a “void if removed” sign on the ticket. If you removed it, it revealed the serial number of the ticket.
I assume that tickets sold at a particular store have somewhat sequential serial numbers.
That one game I linked to cited just over 10 million tickets in the game - I’d guess that’s 10,000 stores across the state each getting 1000 tickets? So if you had a losing ticket you could get the serial number - possibly know that the big winners would not be in that store’s sequence.
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