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

Discussion in 'Off-Topic Discussions' started by Lon Tanner, Jan 23, 2021.

  1. Lon Tanner

    Lon Tanner Supreme Member
    Registered

    Joined:
    Apr 14, 2016
    Messages:
    5,596
    Likes Received:
    5,314
    I never have. Every once in a while I think I will go online and give one of these big Mega Lotteries a go, but then I don't
     
    #1
    Frank Sanoica likes this.
  2. Von Jones

    Von Jones Supreme Member
    Registered

    Joined:
    Jan 25, 2015
    Messages:
    6,508
    Likes Received:
    8,960
    I use to buy them lottery and scratch off tickets. Won a few times but never anything big. I slowly dwindled down until I stopped playing in 2012 a year after my mother died. It just wasn't exciting to me any more.
     
    #2
    Beth Gallagher and Frank Sanoica like this.
  3. Herb Durant

    Herb Durant Very Well-Known Member
    Registered

    Joined:
    Dec 20, 2020
    Messages:
    490
    Likes Received:
    366
    Yes I buy them every week If I win I'm going to spend it on booze ,women and cars the rest I'll just waste. :D
     
    #3
  4. Shirley Martin

    Shirley Martin Supreme Member
    Registered

    Joined:
    Jun 9, 2015
    Messages:
    55,669
    Likes Received:
    23,301
    I buy one maybe three or four times a year. The most I've ever matched was two numbers. Sort of a losing proposition, huh?
     
    #4
    Frank Sanoica likes this.
  5. Hoot Crawford

    Hoot Crawford Veteran Member
    Registered

    Joined:
    Aug 14, 2017
    Messages:
    970
    Likes Received:
    1,545
    Won $4 yesterday. Only cost me $20.....
     
    #5
  6. John Brunner

    John Brunner Senior Staff
    Staff Member Senior Staff Greeter Task Force Registered

    Joined:
    May 29, 2020
    Messages:
    22,684
    Likes Received:
    32,179
    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.
     
    #6
    Last edited: Jan 24, 2021
    Von Jones and Frank Sanoica like this.
  7. John Brunner

    John Brunner Senior Staff
    Staff Member Senior Staff Greeter Task Force Registered

    Joined:
    May 29, 2020
    Messages:
    22,684
    Likes Received:
    32,179
    So is this built into your "Good until next Thursday" timeline, or are we now looking at Wednesday evening? ;)
     
    #7
    Frank Sanoica likes this.
  8. Frank Sanoica

    Frank Sanoica Supreme Member
    Registered

    Joined:
    Feb 21, 2016
    Messages:
    9,297
    Likes Received:
    10,619
    The highly illegal "numbers games" run in the big cities allegedly keep only 4 or 5% of the "take", paying back the rest as winners.

    The highly legal (ONLY) instituted by the truthful and benevolent leaders take $0.11 off the top given to the seller of the $1.00 ticket, piss away $0.48 (meaning steal?), and SELL the remaining "pot" to the highest bidder. (In AZ).

    Let's say the "pot" is shown to be $25 million. Bidders who have plenty of gambling coin, insurance companies, for example, may "buy" the pot for the highest bid, typically about 40 cents on the dollar (so they claim). That means our hypothetical pot was bought for $10 million, on the belief there would be NO BIG WINNER. Winners are paid off, and the remainder is "gravy". If there IS a big winner, they must pay it off. Oh well, next time they'll score BIG.

    Now, tell me which way is the more illegal?

    Frank
     
    #8
    John Brunner likes this.
  9. John Brunner

    John Brunner Senior Staff
    Staff Member Senior Staff Greeter Task Force Registered

    Joined:
    May 29, 2020
    Messages:
    22,684
    Likes Received:
    32,179
    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.
     
    #9
    Frank Sanoica and Von Jones like this.
  10. John Brunner

    John Brunner Senior Staff
    Staff Member Senior Staff Greeter Task Force Registered

    Joined:
    May 29, 2020
    Messages:
    22,684
    Likes Received:
    32,179
    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.
     
    #10
    Frank Sanoica and Von Jones like this.
  11. Ken Anderson

    Ken Anderson Senior Staff
    Staff Member Senior Staff Greeter Task Force Registered

    Joined:
    Jan 21, 2015
    Messages:
    24,327
    Likes Received:
    42,631
    My wife buys some every now and then, but I don't.
     
    #11
  12. Von Jones

    Von Jones Supreme Member
    Registered

    Joined:
    Jan 25, 2015
    Messages:
    6,508
    Likes Received:
    8,960
    I remember staff receiving scratch off tickets from the office manager for Christmas. Some won and some didn't. I didn't.
     
    #12
    Frank Sanoica likes this.
  13. Kate Ellery

    Kate Ellery Supreme Member
    Registered

    Joined:
    Dec 12, 2015
    Messages:
    36,356
    Likes Received:
    7,851
    We will normally buy a lotto ticket for each other’s birthdays and maybe one when they have a big draw .
    If we want to register a ticket when we buy it we have to pay a yearly or the option of a 3 year card to do so,
    It’s around the $4 ( a year ) for the card .....so we now buy online from the offical lotto site it automatically shows us if we won anything .,you can print the tickets off as they are emailed to you as well as being visible on the site .

    But they would go broke wanting for us to buy enough tickets to support someone’s job

    I won $70 this time last year on a ticket hubs had bought me for my Birthday that’s about it
     
    #13
  14. John Brunner

    John Brunner Senior Staff
    Staff Member Senior Staff Greeter Task Force Registered

    Joined:
    May 29, 2020
    Messages:
    22,684
    Likes Received:
    32,179
    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.
     
    #14
  15. Kate Ellery

    Kate Ellery Supreme Member
    Registered

    Joined:
    Dec 12, 2015
    Messages:
    36,356
    Likes Received:
    7,851
    You present the card when buying the ticket at a newsagent @John Brunner
    but if you dont pay the sub to be registered it’s to bad, you have to check the ticket yourself.

    Newsagents / Hotels have a machine where you present the ticket by holding the bar code under the scanner and that lets you know if your a winner .

    I’d rather do the online method less messing about . When you pay the sub for the card lotto notify any registered BIG winners


    I’m a Aussie born and breed ...I was born in New South Wales , (Aust ) moved to South Aust in 1971 been here ever since
     
    #15
    Frank Sanoica and John Brunner like this.

Share This Page