Some people repeatedly win the Wisconsin Lottery. Do they play fair?

1. I’m a straight and narrow physicist, who, by chance, made the acquaintance of, and hung out with convenience store owners and assorted low lives. (There was a point in my existence where I considered this aspect of lower middle class culture exotic or titillating.) I would like to disabuse all the star programmers and scientists who read Hacker News of any notion that the economic subgroup cited does not have extremely intelligent members in surplus, easily able to outwit state authorities in the crimes (and they are crimes— statistics here are reliable) cited. 2. A key point of the article is that the state’s revenue is not damaged by an unfair distribution of winnings. Indeed, were it to become well known that the lottery was unfair, the revenues do stand to be damaged. So there is zero incentive for the state to match any sort of sophistication on the part of cheaters with the necessary investigative prowess to catch them. 3. Most of the instances cited are clear examples of convenience store employees being able to detect the winning tickets in an undetectable way. This is indeed the case, and is well known in the industry. The article, I conjecture, greatly underestimates the sophistication of the detection methods. 4. I would guess that a majority of multiple winners NOT connected with scratch-off pre-detection are associated with various levels of money laundering. 5. There are times when it is more propitious to play these moron games. But I would defy you to find a situation where the odds are actually in your favor, i.e. where your expectation value of winnings is not negative.

One could argue that scratch-off games are inherently unfair, because the game provider already knows whether or not a ticket is a winner, and is hiding that information from the purchaser. The method of hiding could be imperfect. The odds calculations could have a flaw.

If you have any ambitions for cracking a lottery game, go for the small games in states with unsophisticated gaming regulators.

In any case, playing scratch-offs successfully requires research into the rules, which players hardly ever do. For instance, if the top prize for a scratch-off game has already been won, you should never play that game again. If it hasn't been won, you aggressively sell those tickets to other people, let them scratch, and then collect their non-winners for the second-chance drawing. You can't rely on the odds on the back of the ticket, you have to continually recheck the prizes won and recalculate the odds, and only play when expected value rises above ticket cost.

And that ignores completely the possibility that convenience store clerks are cherry-picking all the winners off the spool before you get the chance to play. It's just not worth it for anyone, unless they cheat in some way.

Related: http://highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/lotto-winners

The bit about second chance drawings... Are there rules about you having to be the person who bought the ticket? I see discarded losing (I'm assuming) tickets outside convenience stores all the time (maybe just in states without those drawings.) It seems like it would be relatively easy to get $5 worth of losing lottery tickets without spending $5. Especially while working at a convenience store.

The article suggests "micro-scratching" as a cheating technique. Wouldn't just completely scratching off and re-applying the scratch material be the easiest way to cheat?

Wasn't there just an article on here about a retired couple exploiting a game flaw with a purchasing pool? The lotto didn't care, it doesn't affect them. I think it's more likely people found a flaw in the game than cheating / fraud.

Anecdotal, but in my experience buying scratch offs in Wisconsin: The winning tickets seemed to be "front loaded" into a new game with diminishing odds as the game ages.

You don't have to trick the state into thinking that the ticket hasn't been tampered with, just the next person who buys a scratcher.

This is why it shouldn't be possible to anonymously claim lottery prizes.

This is a pretty obvious path for money laundering and other forms of corruption and fraud.

In addition to the obvious scams and microscratching, I’d be surprised if this wasn’t an avenue for organized crime to launder money. The store(s) get the sales and a percentage, and the launderer gets clean money out of the other end.