Admit it: It's fun to game the system.
Not to mention—in this economy especially—everyone needs a backup plan. (If you require further proof on that point, see our colleague Jeff Cox's terrific article about Bill Gross—for some truly disturbing insights into how screwed up things really are.)
And so, it brings me great pleasure to present to you this: How to win at scratch off Lotto.
According to the Consumerist, it seems that a geological statistician name Mohan Srivastava cracked a mathematical code on some of the most common scratch off lottery tickets sold in the United States. The strategy Srivastava employed subsequent to his discovery—basically analyzing the patterns of numbers that appear on the front of the ticket, then returning the tickets that did not fit the winning pattern—allowed him to kind of clean up.
While claims have been made that the weakness has been fixed, it seems that it is apparently still possible to substantially tilt the odds of winning in your favor by observing some of Srivastava's techniques.
It may not be such a bad idea. If you currently work on Wall Street, and you make the jump to playing the Lotto fulltime, you still get to work with numbers— but without having to deal with the crowds on the 4 Train.
Plus, this enterprise pays cash—though, admittedly, only up to the $20 denominations of the tickets.
Note: More detail on the story can be found by scrolling to the bottom of the Consumerist post and clicking on the link to the original article in Wired Magazine.
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