Introduction

A couple of decades ago I was asked to write a program that was supposed to earn me and the client wealth beyond measure.

The client had invented a scheme for beating the lotteries by covering certain number combinations, and he needed me to generate a massive list of all those combinations. I accepted the job, but only because he was my friend, and because he agreed to pay me up front.

When I finally gave him the list, I advised him to be careful. Do some dry runs first: spend a few weeks checking the winning numbers against the combinations to see if they would have won, before risking any real money. He assured me that he was not an idiot.

He lost a ton of money and eventually switched to horse racing.

A decade later, another friend told me how he tried to overcome the lotteries through brute force. One bright morning he strode into the lottery shop and bought a thousand Quick Picks. He was very particular about getting tickets that were truly random, before any other customer could "contaminate" the machine with their purchase.

"Let me guess," I said. "You spent a thousand dollars and won back three hundred."

He said, "That's right, how did you know?"

The years have gone by. And I've learned a few things about lotteries. I've studied the probabilities and how they are they are calculated. I've written a few programs to analyze them, such as this odds calculator for creating lotteries and this one for simulating lotteries from all over the world.

I don't care about the prizes; I've bought tickets that I never bothered to check. Rather, I'm intrigued about the system and the psychology behind it. Why do people play a game that is so steeply stacked against them? Is there a way to enjoy playing even if you never win? What can you take away from lotteries, and what should you leave behind? These and more questions will, I hope, be answered (or at least thrashed over) in the pages that follow.

Some of my essays may be critical of lotteries, and even downright harsh. But despite their tone (and the site's title, which could mean "against lotteries" or "scam lotteries"), I don't oppose them, for many good reasons. Rather, I hope I can teach you more about the game, so you can at least have more fun with it, even if it never makes you rich.

And now some words of warning. If you are a hardcore lottery user, if you call lottery tickets your "investment," if you think you can win by studying past numbers or spending your rent money on tickets (because "Surely one of them has to win"), if you think you will overcome the odds through sheer determination and superior brainpower, then you'd better leave this site right now. It will just make you mad.

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