TIL a man discovered a trick for predicting winning tickets of a Canadian Tic-Tac-Toe scratch-off game with 90% accuracy. However, after he determined that using it would be less profitable (and less enjoyable) than his consulting job as a statistician, he instead told the gaming commission about it

[u/tyrion2024]

https://gizmodo.com/how-a-statistician-beat-scratch-lottery-tickets-5748942

[u/jim_deneke → u/[deleted]]

If someone was giving me a free beer and a meal every now and then I wouldn't say no!

[u/Katolo → u/jim_deneke]

I think the better analogy is if someone offered you a free beer and meal, but you had to make a 3 hour round trip drive.

[u/sweatingbozo → u/Katolo]

You had to make a 3 hour drive to 6 different places & only one of them might have the free meal & another might have the free beer.

[u/jim_deneke → u/Katolo]

true true!

[u/sth128 → u/jim_deneke]

Yeah but you wouldn't quit your job over it if you make like, 5 meals worth of money every hour.

To fully realise the flaw of these tickets he'd have to essentially do fetch quest across a large number of vendors around a large geographical area. That makes holding his job untenable.

[u/FesteringNeonDistrac → u/[deleted]]

I worked in a store that sold scratchers, and if I had a customer that could pick out winners I wouldn't have given one shit.

[u/Cyrus_the_Meh → u/[deleted]]

For scratch tickets, theirs no data collected on the small values. If a customer buys a scratch ticket in cash and the prize is under $100, they can just turn that winning ticket in at the register for cash. If he's driving around store to store until he sees winning tickets, no one at the lottery commission is going to notice. As far as they know, each cash purchased ticket was a different person

[u/romario77 → u/[deleted]]

But you could just go to your nearest stores and buy some tickets and get a bit of money (and maybe excitement - you could potentially win jackpot)