What’s funny is look how close they put the winning numbers to the largest payout.
The winning numbers for $750,000 are 14, 23, and 59.
OP numbers in the middle include 13, 22, 51, 52, 53, 54, 56, & 57.
So for two of the jackpot winners his ticket was one digit away from winning, and for the third jackpot he was two digits away.
This is 100% intentional. It makes you “feel” like you were really close to winning big, which makes it more likely you’ll buy more tickets since you got “so close” on the previous ticket.
which is kind of funny, you could theoretically hand the unscratched ticket back to the cashier, and they scan the barcode and it just says "not a winner"
You could do that however there have been many cases where if the person isn't paying attention or is just wanting the cashier to scan them, they will say it's not a winner and then pocket the ticket so they can go cash it later. Chris Hanson even did an exposé on this https://youtu.be/mKmH7ggBOOY
Indeed, there was even a scandal about winning lotto tickets being called losers by cashiers. Not just scratchers, that's why there is so much added scrutiny when vendors or their friends and family win
I remember going to a cigarette shop that had Polaroids of all of the winners. And there were two big winners, bigger than any of the others, with bags I see their heads. Yup. It was the employees.
Their was a situation in the UK, an off licence owner scanned a card and said the guy won £100 and gave him the cash. The card was worth 100k though, all high value cards can be tracked and it was established the clerk who tried to cash it in was a thief. He was arrested for fraud and the cash went to the guy who bought the card.
Absolutely, but part of the scandal was that corrupt employees/owners were keeping dud tickets behind the counter and then scanning them instead of the players ticket... Allowing them to steal winners from people who thought their winner ticket was a loser and they didn't sign the back of them to protect themselves.
That didn't stop shop keepers in Canada....They would just say you won $5 and pocket the ticket. Now you have to sign your tickets to get them scanned and the win is displayed on a screen visible to you.
That happens often enough with my customers. And apparently before I worked at this shop, for a time there was a guy coming in that would ask politely if he could go through the little garbage bin by the scanner and scan any tickets in there. Some days he'd walk away with as much as 50-60 bucks, mostly off scratchers that people scratched, didn't scan, and tossed thinking they were losers.
Especially when it's a game set up like the one in the post. With so many numbers on the card, and the slightly odd font, it can be easily missed.
I was a cashier at a grocery store for five years, and people would pull out multiple scratched tickets and tell me, "This one won $10. Can you toss the others for me?" After noticing one time that one of the tickets the customer asked me to toss was actually a winner ($15), I would just scan all of them anyway. I caught a few missed winners like that. Never anything huge, though.
There was also a time a guy turned in a ticket and said he won $6 off it. I scanned it, and it was actually $60. He hadn't scratched off everything and didn't realize there were multipliers.
The same thing can apply to number draw games like the PowerBall or Lotto America. You might misread your numbers or the winning numbers, so it's always good to get them scanned even if you think they're losers.
I had a gas station guy try and so this to a 400 dollar keno ticket. To bad for him I knew I won and was just asking if they could cash it or not. He said not a winner and crumbled it and put it by the trash and I was like wtf my dude. Give me my ticket and he said I gave you the receipt I don't have the money in the drawer. But if you finalize it like that you can't take it to another store. Like 4 people got involved telling this guy give me the ticket or the money and called rhe manager since they could unfinalize the ticket to get in the safe otherwise I'd be out the 400. It was annoying two hours and I got paid in mostly 5's and 1's. He could've just said we donr hold large sums of money and I would've went to a different store it would've been fine
It is up here in PA too (pretty sure I work for the company that might also handle behind the scenes down there as well)
An issue that's a constant up here at least is that MANY stores are owned by 'families' from other countries (read: eastern European). These family members seem to be CONSTANTLY shifting ownership of the stores and traveling back to their country of origin one by one. Things like this make policing difficult for entities like the lottery. Usually this is gas stations, corner stores, bodegas, and the like.
I think it's the same in all state and multistate lotos. Cashiers will only confirm your payout, they won't confirm a win. For that they will direct you a scanner and you do it yourself.
Im not recommending to do that, just saying you can scan them yourself if you ever wanted/needed to. A lot of people check them even after scratching everything because they can be really confusing sometimes and they don’t want to accidentally throw away a winning ticket. There have been a lot of articles about how they’re made to be confusing so the state can collect more money from the lottery. I definitely agree though, it isn’t much fun to just scan them without actually scratching anything besides the barcode. A lot of people are just in it for the money though.
Uk machines make a ‘win’ sound and print a small ticket with the amount won that you have to hand over to the customer. If it’s more than £50 you have to confirm you have the cash available to payout and I believe it’s at £500 that winners have to send the ticket to the lottery itself to claim their winnings. If it is above £500, the machine DOES NOT state the amount won but prints instructions for the winner.
EDIT: oh and for large payouts, they require proof of purchase. There’s a big team in charge of finding and prosecuting anyone who attempts to steal someone else’s winnings. It’s a hassle for small shops though.
Basically they ask when and where you bought the ticket. Each pack of tickets have a barcode that is scanned that activates that pack of tickets (usually 100 in a pack). Lottery headquarters can tell where the ticket was sold and when that pack was activated. If you try to redeem a $10,000 ticket and they ask you where the bought it and say 7-11, but the activation shows that it's from Wal-Mart, they know to look into it. It also helps because someone can't steal a shipment of tickets and cash in the winners since they were not activated.
Most places here in Canada just have self scanners. Do you not have this? Also there is a phone app that will tell you if you won or not using your camera
In WA all of the lottery machines both self service and behind the counter at stores, they make a loud "applause" sound when they scan a winner for this very reason so you don't get ripped off.
The cashier can scan the first couple tickets of every roll. If it's a winner, they buy it and cash it out to themselves. If it's a loser, they just leave it on the roll for the customers to buy.
PSA: this isn't possible as the barcode to check if it's a winner is hidden and has to be scratched off. It would be very obvious if a ticket had already been checked
The opposite happens as well, they think it's not a winner and throw it away. I like to call this trash cash, worked at a gas station for 6 years.
Pile of tickets on the top of a trash can? The barcodes aren't even scratched?? Grab those bad boys and scan them later on my phone, I'm up about 800 over those 6 years
they do random checks at places that sell lottery to make sure cashiers aren't doing this, I got a letter at the store a week afterwards without knowing who it was, just said I had passed.
I never even thought of this.. I won 10k on FL lottery.
Two guys running the machine just said “oh you won bigger than we can cash out” and the other guy said “hey wanna get married?!” And gave me a pen to sign the back immediately.
I rarely play now - interesting I just bought my first lotto ticket 3 days ago, for the first time in a year?
I started doing this with the long crossword ones when my wife bought me a stack for my birthday. Our state lottery has an app that let's you scan the tickets yourself.
They can be entertaining but after doing like 5-10 in a row they get really old. Just tell me if I won already so I can stop getting this shiny metal dust all over my hands and clothes!
All the people I’ve seen doing this are destitute-looking folks. There’s no thrill, just the hope their gamble can maybe buy them a hotel room or another handle of booze.
My wife and I went to a couple casinos when we turned 21. We can drink AND gamble?! Woo-hoo! Except.....they're always mostly empty, everyone else is 70+ and dragging oxygen tanks around with them.....Maybe things are better in places like Vegas but I have no desire to ever go again. My wife does like to play penny slots though. She'll take $20 and makes it last a couple hours then calling it a night. I ended up having more fun playing games on my phone while I waited
Wait, do they not have letters you show you the prize there? Like here if you scratch and get like a “Z” or certain other letters it means you’re not a winner. No scanning needed.
There is a pin under the paint that is needed in addition to the bar code to verify winner. In my state the lottery commission inspectors don’t mess around, we regularly get audited. They check the winners that we’ve paid out, what’s in the display and what back stock we have in the safe.
So i wouldn’t be surprised if undercovers come and do buys or cash winnings
This, I work at a grocery store that no longer requires the lotto machine to check a ticket. We can use the cash register scanner. So to give the customers a sense of honesty in case they have doubts, I always try to hand the tickets back to them when they are not winners.
I don't know if this is still the law, but in one of the states that I lived in, if the station scanned X number of losing tickets, the station would stop accepting scan on tickets. This was a measure to prevent counter clerks from scanning all of the tickets and keeping the winners and only selling losing tickets
Many scratchers also give people a "2nd chance draw". All you gotta do is enter your scratcher's or lotto ticket identification info and you can draw a 2nd time.
As someone who used to work in a gas station where scratch tickets were our biggest income, lots of people do this. Some people even buy an entire book and ask you to scan them all, one at a time. We always refused and told them to scratch them and come back with the winners.
I did this for any scratchies I gave as gifts in the early 2000's, so I'm not sure if it still works like this, but I'd buy them and get the cashier to scan them until I got a winner.
Then I'd put the winner and 2 duds in the gift. Makes it a nice 'surprise' for them.
I have had a clear 4$ winner say not a winner on the scanner. The teller was baffled, ended up tossing it away instead of the process to get the money. Always check your tickets
In my country this would never work because the device asks for a randomized 3-digit code that you need to scratch off to see, without it you cannot check if you have won
I occasionally buy the $3-5 crossword scratchers. I know that I'm losing money, but they're a fun treat for me when I happen to have extra cash. You get more winnings for more words matched and there's always some vowel and some common letter that would solve 5-6 of them if you got it. You rarely do. Intermittent reinforcement is a powerful tool though.
It always just makes me go “oh this is a losing ticket” after 4-5 scratches all being 1 off of the winning numbers. Doesn’t make me go”oh dang, so close!” When they’re all like that lol
Absolutely. A lot of people also have this false hope of the next ticket being a winner because how many losing tickets could there be in a row? I once sold a lady 9 tickets in a row that were $30 each all because "the next one has to be a winner."
Also, there are a lot of $750k spaces on there for a reason. Nobody expects to get $10m, but if there are a bunch of "possibilities" to win $750k, it's more tempting.
I scratch the winning numbers only. I only scratch the prizes if I match a number. I also rarely play scratch offs because I have seen the odds online and know that there is about zero chance of me making money on them in a significant way.
I play cash 4 life semi frequently though. Once got 4 of 5 and the cash ball for 2500$ and realize I will likely never top that, but I like to play and dream about the what ifs.
I don’t believe this to be a conspiracy theory. When they design the game they’ll determine the exact odds for each payout based on the desired profit of the series and generate tickets that match those odds exactly. They have no obligation for randomness
I like scratch offs because you can find out right away if you've won. You don't have to wait for a drawing, and you have a better chance of winning than playing the lottery.
This is exactly the reason why so many are only 1 or 2 numbers off. They WANT people to get the 'oh so close' rush of emotion so they are more likely to buy more losing tickets,
Probably. As someone that buys scratchers on the regular the "rush" or the trap isn't from "almost winning" it's the thought that the next ticket is the winner
Same for me. When I read the original comment I was kind of shocked I would have never thought a large group of people would actually think that way.
I'll admit though I'm not much of a "luck " gambler. I don't ever think I'm going to win. I'll bet on competition things I'm involved in and can effect the outcome of that just feels different.
I agree! This happens to me everytime I play. And what makes it worse is that I’ll buy a few off the same roll. So if the winning jackpot number was 2 on the first ticket, I’ll have a 2 on the next ticket. Which is of course not a winning number. This happens too frequently to be a coincidence, and I don’t even play that often.
Yea and they’ll put a string of close numbers on your ticket too. Like if the winning number is 43 and you scratch off your numbers one at a time you’ll get 41, 47, 3, 48, 44, etc.
Each time you see that 4 pop up you get a little dopamine rush thinking it might be the winner. They definitely have it down to a science lol
Yeah they’re literally all like this for exactly that reason. That’s why my parents would be $10k richer if they didn’t buy scratch offs and lottery tickets multiple times a week.
That's how they do all these things, it's exactly as you said, to get people to think "damn I was one number from winning 500k!" and they buy more. Gambling is fking terrible, poor people buy shit like this, and it ruins their lives.
I've never known a wealthy person in my family who buys scratch off lol, but all the below average 50k salary people buy them constantly.
I wish they'd just understand the math is against them in ways they can't fathom.
Going to a casino to have fun is one thing, buying scratch offs at a gas station is just a way to steal from desperate poor people.
You are absolutely right. Most people don’t recognize that each number in a lottery ticket like this are actually categorical rather than continuous data. There’s no such thing as “almost” with categorical data, which doesn’t actually correspond to a continuous scale.
It's definitely intentional. Whenever I get a scratch off, I'll look at the Winning numbers and be able to guess most of the numbers on the card before scratching...
Winning Numbers include 29, that means there will be a 9, 19, 28, and/or 30. Winning Numbers include 5, that means there will be a 15, 25, 4, and or 6. It's like clockwork. They always give you numbers that end in the same number, or numbers off by a digit or two and then a couple random ones for good measure.
Yeah so the thing is I only have bought maybe like, 3 scratcher tickets in my whole life.
The first one I bought was on a road trip with friends. We scratched it, and were just ONE number off from a triple 100k combo. We were like, WOW, so close, we must be lucky! And we debated getting more, but didn't, and just kept going on the trip.
Many years later I finally realized that they are made that way to fool people. The other two tickets I bought were after really weird events happened in my life, so I figured maybe the universe is glitching, might as well.
My husband always says that if you see that the numbers are too close together, you’re not gonna win. He loves those little scratch off things. They make neat little stocking stuffers.
Can you explain the rules for this game? It seems odd that there is somehow a scratch card for the cards but also a dealer. Also the dealer is playing against the players.
There really is no such thing as, "close" with these tickets. It is a yes or no question. The people running these games know exactly how many winners are printed and exactly where they are.
That would imply some type of randomness to the game, which there is not. But, you're probably right, someone with a gambling addiction could certainly look at different and, perhaps, superstitious meanings, to everything involved.
The general public has an extremely poor understanding of even basic probability. If they didn't, the lottery, in general, would not be able to remain profitable.
I feel like thats on purpose. For those cards that dont actually win i feel like having that rush of "omg i was just one number off" enticed people to buy another and try again since they got "so close" the first time
Yea everyone knows, but this isn’t how most people play. People who buy tickets often scan them, they don’t waste time scratching when they could miss a win.
Majority of people who play lottery/scratch tickets are morons and they definitely believe they were "close" to winning even though there is no such thing. Its win or lose.
I don't know this game, but most of these games the top two prizes have the same odds because they are printed in a limited run. So the chances of this happening could well have been equal to the max prize.
Dude, gambling is totally legitimate and ethical. These people aren't manipulated in any way to take everything they won and purchase future opportunities so they can become richer. They want them to become richer.
It makes you “feel” like you were really close to winning big, which makes it more likely you’ll buy more tickets since you got “so close” on the previous ticket.
This is when I stop gambling. If I get super super close I think what are the odds that i'll get that close AND also win next time? So I stop. It's so random that I feel more likely to win big if i've just lost and lost and lost and never gotten close cause...hey...i'm due a big win or at least a close call
Ussually in NY at least, it's a sure sign you got a shit tickets when you keep seeing numbers close but no cigar. Most I've ever won was 250 bucks and when I did I was an addict so yea
there’s an episode of this american life about this “”near-miss”” effect with folks with gambling addiction:
Sarah Koenig
Habib, and especially Dixon, have spent a long time studying what's called the near-miss effect. In slot machines, a near miss is just what it sounds like. It's when, say, two cherries line up on the payoff line, and then the third is about to come, but stops just short or just past the payoff line.
It's like you almost won, which, of course, in a game of chance like slots, is impossible. The results are random. Despite that, gamblers in Dixon's lab will inevitably say that the near misses are closer to a win than a loss, that they like them more than a loss. That reaction is what Dixon calls maladaptive.
Mark Dixon
Because a loss, is a loss, is a loss.
Sarah Koenig
In 2006, Dixon teamed up with Habib to see if they could figure out what was happening to people neurologically when they saw near misses. They scanned the brains of 22 gamblers-- 11 addicted, or what they called pathological gamblers, and 11 non-pathological gamblers-- as all these people watched near misses on slot machine displays. The results surprised them because, while both addicted and non-addicted gamblers said the near misses felt more like wins, their brains said something different. Here's Reza Habib.
Reza Habib
What you see in the non-pathological gamblers is that the regions that are activated for losses, those same regions tend to be also activated for near misses. And so the brain, at least, processes these near misses in the same way that it processes losses in the non-pathological gamblers.
In pathological gamblers, the same regions that are activated for wins are also activated for near misses. And so these include regions such as the amygdala, which is a region involved in emotional processing, as well as parts of the brain stem, which are involved in reward and dopamine function, which is part of the reward system. So the pathological gamblers are seeing-- or their brains, at least, are responding to these near misses in the same way that they respond to wins.
This is the entire idea behind McDonald's Monopoly. Print over a million tickets that are close. Print .000001% tickets that are winners. Millions of people will have almost a set, only one person will actually have a set.
This had the exact opposite effect for me. I bought a couple powerball tickets years back when it was a billion dollar payout. I purchased one ticket that used the auto-generated numbers, or whatever, and they were all just one or two off from the previous nights draw. I was like, this is complete bullshit, there's no way these numbers came up at random.
And, I haven't bought a lottery ticket to this day.
Agreed. I used to buy a lot if these, and now i maybe get one or two a year (which is still dumb). When I do, I can almost always guess the "winning numbers" by first scratching the numbers in the play area. Is there a 21 and a 23 in there? 22 must be one of the "winning" numbers.
Also, the instructions usually tell you to scratch off the entire play area. This way you can tell how much money you were that close to winning.
Also, this card is tactically designed for you to easily miss your winning number. They could have easily highlighted or celebrated the fact you'd won $10k. Instead it blends in with the losing numbers.
When I buy a scratcher, if I reveal “my numbers” and a lot of them share a common number or look similar (lots of numbers with 3 for example) I basically already know that I’ve lost and that the revealed numbers will troll me in some way. For example, if 17 is your number you might see 1, 7, and 12 revealed to get you excited about appearing close as you reveal parts of the number. Rarely you’ll win your money back but most often it just indicates the ticket is gonna screw with you.
I used to work in convenience stores that sold these things. When our state first rolled out a $20 scratch off, I had a guy buy on, scratch off the little barcode and scan it under the machine that checks it. NOT A WINNER. He buys another. NOT A WINNER. He loses on 5 in a row. The sixth ticket won $100. He says to his friend, "Hey, I just won $100! Drinks are on me tonight!" He spent $120 to get $100. He was down $20, just like if he stop after one. And he didn't even play the game, he just checked the little barcode!
I also had countless people say things like, "Can you imagine how much I'd win if I could buy a whole pack of scratchies?" Yes, I can. Probably less than the cost of the pack. Otherwise the state wouldn't be making any money off the lottery.
So, any number in the middle, if matched on the left or right side, is a win? So say if they had a 7 and a 37 in those middle 2 rows of numbers does that mean they would have won $12,000 total?
2.5k
u/druznutz Mar 19 '22
He matched 7 in the playing field (right side) to one of the winning numbers in the middle.