Now I Know Read Free Page B

account in
The New York Times,
the lamppost struck Caronna in the head, sending her into a coma for nearly a month. Nine years later, New York Yankees pitcher Cory Lidle crashed his plane into an apartment building overlooking the East River, killing him and his flight instructor. The plane’s engine landed in one of the apartments—owned by Kathleen Caronna. This time, she wasn’t harmed, as she wasn’t home, but the apartment’s bedroom was destroyed by the ensuing fire.
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BEATING THE ODDS
HOW MATHEMATICIANS BEAT THE LOTTERY
    The running joke is that the lottery is a tax on those who can’t do math. But on occasion, we see the opposite—people who are very, very strong in math not only play the lottery but also walk away with their pockets flush with newfound money.
    Cash WinFall is a rather generic lottery game in Massachusetts. Pick six numbers out of forty-six. Get them all correct, win the jackpot. There are prizes for getting two numbers right (a free ticket), three ($5), four ($150), and five ($4,000) as well—in total, your odds of winning something are better than 1:7. Drawings are held twice a week (Monday and Thursday) and tickets cost $2 each. The jackpot begins at $500,000, but if no one wins it—and it has only been won once in the game’s history—it progressively increases until it hits $2 million, when it is reset.
    The state makes more than $10 million each year on the game. And a few times each year, as reported by
The Boston Globe
, a bunch of players also make out like bandits. The details are a bit hazy as those who beat the game are loathe to talk about it. But the basic story is as follows.
    When the pot breaks that $2 million ceiling but goes unclaimed, it gets reset to $500,000 for the subsequent drawing. But instead of simply resetting the $2 million jackpot to $500,000 and keeping the $1.5 million (or more) overage, the state rolls the excess money into the secondary prizes. During these “rolldowns,” the secondary prizes can, and have, hit ridiculous amounts, depending on the amount of excess money in the pot and the number of tickets purchased for the rolldown drawing.
    Take, for example, the payouts as of July 14, 2011. Because of the nearly $1.9 million of excess money available, and because relatively few tickets were sold, all the secondary prizes were greatly increased. Instead of winning $5 for hitting three of six numbers, you would win $26. Instead of winning $150 for hitting four of six numbers, you’d get $802. Instead of winning $4,000 for hitting five of six, you’d cash out to the tune of $19,507. (And historically, that’s a low amount for a rolldown; once, the five-out-of-six prize was more than $100,000.)
    Say you spend $100,000 on the tickets, each $2. That’s 50,000 entries. The odds of getting four of six numbers correct are about 1:800, so you will roughly break even from that alone. You’ll hit three or six about 1,000 times—that’s $26,000. And you may hit that five of six mini-jackpot once or even twice, adding another $25,000 to $100,000 to your saving account—and yes, that is on top of the $100,000 you have already recouped.
    And this is exactly what some people are doing. A statistical rundown suggests that purchasing that same $100,000 all but guarantees breaking even, at worst (unless someone wins the $2 million-plus grand prize, in which case there’s no rolldown from which to benefit). One couple, the Selbees—who run a gambling/investment firm out of Western Michigan—spent more than $300,000 on Cash WinFall tickets just before the July 14 drawing. It was not the first time the Selbees tried to exploit the rolldown drawing: To date, they have claimed over $1 million in prizes.
    The lottery has taken some measures—for example, limiting the number of tickets a person can purchase at one time—to prevent this loophole from being further abused. (And the press and visibility around the opportunity should take care of it,