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Lotto Fever
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By Richard Manning, Jr.
You have it all figured out. Your years of clinging to that strategy of using
the same half dozen numbers you took from the uniforms of your six favorite San
Diego Padres is finally going to pay off this time. You have spent hours
crafting the most eloquent way to tell your boss to shove it on your final trip
out of the office. You developed a mental checklist of things you must do to
thwart the legion of instant “relatives” that are undoubtedly bound to show up
at your doorstep. You also pay no mind to the statistic that says that you have
a better chance of being struck by lightning than you do of winning that big
lottery payout you just know is coming your way because of the ticket you
purchased last night.
Based on probability charts, playing the lottery looks to be the most hopeless
game known to man. After all, the one in 5 million chance of becoming filled
with electric cloud juice in your lifetime is better odds than hitting the big
prize in most states. Yet millions of people never miss an opportunity to play
it, gladly forking over hard-earned money for the once-in-several-lifetimes
opportunity to win a ridiculously large pile of cash that will be theirs and
theirs alone. Everybody who plays the lottery thinks that, by the way. There
has never been anybody in the game’s history that has thought to them self,
“Gee, it would be great if someone else had the same numbers that I picked, so
we can share the winnings.”
Why do people play it? The same reason every form of gambling exists in the
world: Hope. In the case of the lottery, it is the hope that it will better
your life, and that it will make you feel better about who you are and what you
can do. When you factor in that hope into the average person’s life, with all
the routine and mundane trappings that can make existence dreary at times,
somehow the odds do not appear as daunting as they are while entrenched in the
cold, unmoving world of probability. Besides, having hope will go a long way to
help you ignore that pesky lightning statistic.
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