Do You Buy Lottery Tickets Of Any Kind? Have You Won Anything?

I play on average once a week...sometimes twice a week, and sometimes every other week. My schedule is COVID-disrupted. I don't go for the big jackpots, and I drop $10 each time.

I play 2 draw (non-scratch) games:
-One game is advertised as giving you enough money to net $1 Million after taxes. (It's a lie, but still I play.)
--A friend of mine won $1M a few years ago. He bought me lunch. I left the tip.
-The other game has a pre-tax jackpot of $100,000.

Because these are not mega-dollar jackpots, the odds are way less obscene than the games you see covered on the news (the odds are 75x and 400x times better than Powerball.)

I once won $250. I had a streak of about 6 weeks where I won $40 a week. I've won a few bucks here & there. It has not been positive cash flow for me.

In Virginia, you cannot remain anonymous if you win. With COVID, your name is still published but you are masked in your pics.

There's a bigger government lie besides the "Net $1 million after taxes" lie...

The lottery is advertised in Virginia as "funding education." That's how this once-conservative state got a lottery in the first place. It's not true. What happens is there is an education budget set at the beginning of each fiscal year. Lottery revenues are periodically transferred into the education budget, and then a like-kind amount is immediately taken back out and put into the general funds. It's a wash. The only incremental dollars the lottery provides for "education" are for the school meals programs.

 

So is this built into your "Good until next Thursday" timeline, or are we now looking at Wednesday evening?

 

Another interesting thing about the Virginia lottery you may have seen on the news when it was in its infancy...

In 1992, a group of Australians pooled their money and resources, hired a statistician, computer-selected the picks for each week (and printed the tickets), then worked through a local accounting firm to go out on their behalf and purchase some large quantities of entries. There were some number of folks hired by the firm to take a block of entries and go to various places (each with their slug of entries and a satchel of cash) to buy tickets. They must have purchased some thousands of entries each week. After each week's number was drawn, the computer program would get rerun and fresh entries would be generated for the next drawing.

Well, they ended up being one of the first (or the first?) winners of a $27,000,000 jackp0t. People were up in arms!!! Damn foreigners takin' our money!!! (Of course, when the Aussies were losing, we welcomed their business, bless their hearts.) Some people wanted a law passed to prevent non-Americans from playing, but it went nowhere...although apparently laws were passed specifically directed at this statistician, since he won a total of 14 lotteries throughout the world. And Virginia initially tried to fight paying out the jackpot (see 1992 newspaper story here.)

There was a one hour documentary made about them winning the Virginia lottery. The kicker was that on the drawing where they won, one of the couriers went to his appointed lottery retailer to buy his batch of entries, and their machine was broken! He had no Plan B. So there was a sizeable blot in that week's calculated entries...but they won anyway.

 

Heck, when the state of Illinois was having financial troubles, they tried issuing I.O.U.s when people won.

We really need to build more prisons.

 

My wife buys some every now and then, but I don't.

 

That's interesting. Every state has its nuances...I forget where you live.

Are you saying you can go into a lottery retailer, buy a physical ticket, take it home, and then register it online with the state as being yours? Is that some sort of theft protection? I assume you still have to be in possession of the physical ticket to declare any winnings (in other words, is registration also for loss of the ticket, or just to prevent someone else from claiming your prize?) We can't register our tickets here in Virginia, nor [technically] can we transfer them to someone else. I don't know what--if anything--buying a ticket online here might do to protect the ticket holder. Likely nothing.

I just waded through a bunch of this stuff on our lottery website (inspired by this thread), and finally satisfied my curiosity on these details. We can buy tickets online for 3 of the 8 draw games played here, and a lot (but not all) of the Instant Win games. The 3 draw games that are available to buy online are the multi-state draw games, not the Virginia-only draw games (you have to read the pdfs of the legalities for each game to figure out which is which.) I guess that Virginia is leveraging the online ticket infrastructure already set up for these games, and does not want to bear the costs for the Virginia-only stuff. Now I know why I cannot play the games I like online.

I also just figured out that none of the Virginia-only draw games have annuities...they are all lump sum payments. I guess the same logic applies as with online ticket sales...let's not burn up the bucks (and take the risk) for the required infrastructure. Just write the check and be done with it.