Srivastava speaks quietly, with a slight stammer. He has a neatly trimmed beard and a messy office. When he talks about a subject he’s interested in—and he’s interested in many things, from military encryption to freshwater fossils—his words start to run into each other.

As a trained statistician with degrees from MIT and Stanford University, Srivastava was intrigued by the technical problem posed by the lottery ticket. In fact, it reminded him a lot of his day job, which involves consulting for mining and oil companies. A typical assignment for Srivastava goes like this: A mining company has multiple samples from a potential gold mine. Each sample gives a different estimate of the amount of mineral underground. “My job is to make sense of those results,” he says. “The numbers might seem random, as if the gold has just been scattered, but they’re actually not random at all. There are fundamental geologic forces that created those numbers. If I know the forces, I can decipher the samples. I can figure out how much gold is underground.”

Srivastava realized that the same logic could be applied to the lottery. The apparent randomness of the scratch ticket was just a facade, a mathematical lie. And this meant that the lottery system might actually be solvable, just like those mining samples. “At the time, I had no intention of cracking the tickets,” he says. He was just curious about the algorithm that produced the numbers. Walking back from the gas station with the chips and coffee he’d bought with his winnings, he turned the problem over in his mind. By the time he reached the office, he was confident that he knew how the software might work, how it could precisely control the number of winners while still appearing random. “It wasn’t that hard,” Srivastava says. “I do the same kind of math all day long.”

That afternoon, he went back to work. The thrill of winning had worn off; he forgot about his lunchtime adventure. But then, as he walked by the gas station later that evening, something strange happened. “I swear I’m not the kind of guy who hears voices,” Srivastava says. “But that night, as I passed the station, I heard a little voice coming from the back of my head. I’ll never forget what it said: ‘If you do it that way, if you use that algorithm, there will be a flaw. The game will be flawed. You will be able to crack the ticket. You will be able to plunder the lottery.’”

The North American lottery system is a $70 billion-a-year business, an industry bigger than movie tickets, music, and porn combined. These tickets have a grand history: Lotteries were used to fund the American colonies and helped bankroll the young nation. In the 18th and 19th centuries, lotteries funded the expansion of Harvard and Yale and allowed the construction of railroads across the continent. Since 1964, when New Hampshire introduced the first modern state lottery, governments have come to rely on gaming revenue. (Forty-three states and every Canadian province currently run lotteries.) In some states, the lottery accounts for more than 5 percent of education funding.

While approximately half of Americans buy at least one lottery ticket at some point, the vast majority of tickets are purchased by about 20 percent of the population. These high-frequency players tend to be poor and uneducated, which is why critics refer to lotteries as a regressive tax. (In a 2006 survey, 30 percent of people without a high school degree said that playing the lottery was a wealth-building strategy.) On average, households that make less than $12,400 a year spend 5 percent of their income on lotteries—a source of hope for just a few bucks a throw.


Mohan Srivastava, a geological statistician living in Toronto, realized that the logic he used to find gold deposits could also crack lottery cards.
Photo: John Midgley
There was a time when scratch games all but sold themselves. But in the past two decades the competition for the gambling dollar has dramatically increased. As a result, many state lotteries have redesigned their tickets. One important strategy involves the use of what lottery designers call extended play. Although extended-play games—sometimes referred to as baited hooks—tend to look like miniature spreadsheets, they’ve proven extremely popular with consumers. Instead of just scratching off the latex and immediately discovering a loser, players have to spend time matching up the revealed numbers with the boards. Ticket designers fill the cards with near-misses (two-in-a-row matchups instead of the necessary three) and players spend tantalizing seconds looking for their win. No wonder players get hooked.

Srivastava had been hooked by a different sort of lure—that spooky voice, whispering to him about a flaw in the game. At first, he tried to brush it aside. “Like everyone else, I assumed that the lottery was unbreakable,” he says. “There’s no way there could be a flaw, and there’s no way I just happened to discover the flaw on my walk home.”

And yet, his inner voice refused to pipe down. “I remember telling myself that the Ontario Lottery is a multibillion-dollar-a- year business,” he says. “They must know what they’re doing, right?”

That night, however, he realized that the voice was right: The tic-tac-toe lottery was seriously flawed. It took a few hours of studying his tickets and some statistical sleuthing, but he discovered a defect in the game: The visible numbers turned out to reveal essential information about the digits hidden under the latex coating. Nothing needed to be scratched off—the ticket could be cracked if you knew the secret code.

Intriguingly more at: http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/01/ff_lottery/all/1

What am I missing here? So the guy can look at a handful of scratch tickets and predict which ones are winners and which ones aren't. Where's the practicality? When you go to buy a scratch ticket in AZ at least, it comes off a roll of tickets. You don't get to sort through a bunch of them and decide which ones you want. If you buy, say, five one dollar tickets and can see that two of them are winners, whoopee! You're going to find out they're winners when you scratch them anyhow. It's interesting math, but doesn't have much practical use other than maybe as a cool trick for amusing people at parties. I play Powerball, and am neither poor nor uneducated. 4 dollars a month seems like a pretty cheap chance at a lot of money, in spite of the astronomical odds. Somebody wins eventually and it won't be me if I didn't buy a ticket, that much is for sure. Nothing else is.

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Read the article?

As a taxpayer, I appreciate your periodic voluntary contribution.

I don't gamble - since I certainly don't need the money, and I hate to give any of it away down a rathole. When I feel like giving money away - it goes to my family, church, or alma mater. Winning even substantial dollars would not change my lifestyle one iota anyway - it never has btw.........so what's the point??

There is NO system.

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"The thing is Bob, its not that I'm lazy...its that I just don't care."

Do you really give money to your family? That's very nice.

You can buy them in bulk and return unused ones, or as the article said simply bride the guys at the store.

By reliably picking winners you can make out, or if you already have illegal money you can launder it.

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Paul I can only read Joe's posts when quote him. I would like to request that when possible if you could make fun of him without the quote feature.

Its really not needed, if one assumes he is talking about his vast "wealth" in some way shape or form, the joke falls in place.

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I second that motion, we really don't need to hear from the source unless the original quote is unusually funny on it's own.

exactly. here in iowa once you buy em they are yours they will not take em back,and you can not buy them with a credit card.also you can buy them over the counter where you can see maybe 2 or 3 tickets or from a machine where you can't see any.either way your gonna have to buy em to look at em,and that still won't guarantee big money.

I wasn't making fun of Joe at all - I was merely expressing my pleasant surprise that he was doing something nice for his family - although...now wait a second, I'm confused - isn't Joe the guy who doesn't like to give handouts? Odd...

That's not exactly true.

If the customer does not hand over the cash, or sez; "forget it," the pre-printed numerical tickets can be voided.

Same with tear-off tickets. Tell the clerk you changed your mind, do not hand over the money and walk - you owe 'em nothing.

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Dangit!

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what the retailer would do in that situation is take the ticket back and just hold it til the next person wantedthat particular ticket then give them that one.but your not buying it and walking and come back and say i don't want this,same with buying from the machines,once the ticket drops its yours.this is not to say that "some" retailers would take em back but it would be frowned upon by the lottery.the lottery does not like to credit tickets unless there is a definate problem with it like if the machine timing is off and it cuts off part of the ticket.

Found out this morning that I guy I work with won the lottery. Good for him, he's a nice guy.

http://www.wral.com/news/local/story/9064464/

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