More on beating the lottery

Two posts by Joshua Green.  From the first one:

This story struck a chord because I also figured out how to beat scatchers (to an extent) while working at a liquor store during college, although not nearly as efficiently as Srivastava did and using "math" that was more or less limited to counting the fingers on my hands. The liquor store was in a pretty shady neighborhood that attracted a lot of alcoholics who loved playing scratchers. I think they liked the social aspect of it as much as anything--hanging around the store and bullshitting us as they rubbed off their tickets. Alcoholics are impulse buyers when it comes to scratchers. They'd buy five, scratch them off, and if they didn't win, they'd buy some more. But these were not wealthy individuals. At a dollar a ticket, they could rarely play more than 10. Then they'd mutter, crestfallen, and go collect enough empty cans to buy a 40.

Scratchers are a simple odds game. The tickets come in packs of a couple hundred. Watching alchies scratch tickets all day, you eventually realize that there are a more or less fixed number of winners per pack. You also realize that if the ten tickets just scratched were losers, there's a pretty decent chance one of the next ones will be a winner. So I fell into the habit of buying a couple tickets anytime I witnessed an alchie on a losing streak. I'd scratch 'em off in front of the poor guy, and more often than not, I'd win a few bucks. Occasionally, even $50 or $100. This would drive the alchies absolutely berzerk--which was great entertainment for bored liquor store clerks who make $5 an hour. And every once in a while, you'd go home with some extra cash.