inauspicio.us

i’m a small-scale gambler

i buy lottery tickets every once in a while when i feel like my luck can’t get any worse, just to prove to myself that actually, it can. the other night, i picked up a lottery ticket that went against my usual strategy for playing scratch tickets. most of the time, i’ll buy the one that has the lowest maximum prize, reasoning that the less money they have to put away for the top prize, the more likely i am to win a few dollars. i figure any two scratch games take in roughly the same amount of money in ticket sales, and all of them pay out about the

same percentage of that money. so if one of them has a million-dollar top prize, and one has a thousand-dollar top prize, i’ll buy the thousand-dollar one every time. almost.

anyhow, this time i went for the one with a ten thousand dollar maximum prize instead of the two thousand dollar maximum prize. i don’t know what made me do it: sunspots? el nino? a french figure-skating judge? i may never know. this particular ticket was a “win up to four times on one ticket”, a slogan i always disregarded as a blatant lie. today, though, i offer you proof that that tagline is true:

yup, i won ALL FOUR TIMES. my next project is to prove that you can actually win as much as they say you can. in the meantime, i’m trying to decide how to spend my ten bucks.