So if you played the die game and the payout for guessing correctly was 4-to-1, the house take would be 20%. ![]() A fair house take is 5% or 10%, in my view. You lose $5 but then win back $5 (plus your original wager) so you break even.īut the “house” has to make something to pay for its oversight and management. How can you verify that this is an even-money game? You place your $1 bet on all 6 numbers. That 5-1 payout on a $1 bet would earn you $5 in an even-money game. Let’s say you wager $1 on a game in which you roll a die and you get back $5 if you guess the number. Here’s a simple example as an introduction. Most players have no idea how unlikely they are to win a valuable prize (one in which they will have earned enough to stop playing, ending up an overall winner.) ![]() No one would willingly gamble in a game where the house gets 80% or 90%, would they?īut I believe that the “World Class Millions” game has an effective house advantage of 85%, 90%, or even 95%, depending on the assumptions you want to make. 10% may also be reasonable depending on the game. In my view, a house advantage of 5% is about what you should expect. That is fair and to be expected, because of the overhead of running the game, paying for the building and heat, the dealer’s time, making enough to cover losses, etc., all must be factored in. In an honest game (and not all games are honest, even Lottery-sponsored games), a gambler expects the house to win a little more often than it loses. There are three basic elements to gambling: the amount you wager, the odds of winning, and the payout. I am also going to confine this article to pure gambling games and not consider games which mix skill and luck or where players compete against each other (like poker). Also note that the “bottom line” odds of an average of one winner in 2.81 tickets sold is misleading, which we will get into below. On the Lottery site, the payoff dollars per level of prize are not shown. This is the same as my spreadsheet above, but I have included some additional calculations necessary to analyze the game. (Click on the “World Class Millions” ticket). You can see the posted Lottery odds on their website at. So I’m going to start with a brief overview of this so one can interpret the odds and payouts that are published by the Mass Lottery. I have to assume that most people who participate in Lottery instant games are mostly unfamiliar with odds, payouts, and “return on investment” in evaluating the fairness and value of gambling opportunities, otherwise they wouldn’t play. I have included an Excel spreadsheet showing the odds and payouts, which you can download here: ![]() In this expose’, I will explain a bit about gambling theory and why state-sponsored games have any participants at all given their terrible returns, and then look at the “World Class Millions” scratch ticket and show why it is such a bad value. And that’s not even getting into who tends to participate, which generally are those who can least afford to lose their money. The Lottery pitches how much money it raises for cities and towns, and how we are “all winners” because of the Lottery, but when you understand how they mislead and manipulate their patrons, you might think differently about this method of raising revenues. The entire state budget is around $35 billion. The “World Class Millions” instant ticket figures to sell 250 million tickets at $30 each for total revenues of three-quarters of a billion dollars. The Lottery has perfected this money-making machine and keeps figuring out ways to extract more and more money from Massachusetts residents. Since then, the cost and prizes have grown enormously and the “gambling value” has gone from bad to worse. Thirty years ago, instant tickets cost $1 and you could win $20,000 or $50,000. ![]() This was when the Lottery first introduced “scratch tickets” in which you scratched off windows to reveal codes or prize amounts. I’m a game-player (backgammon, chess, and bridge), take the occasional trip to a casino, and have been following the Mass State Lottery on-and-off for about 30 years ever since I published a newspaper for Bingo players back in the 1980s and 1990s.
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