Take a chance, readers:
"Lottery restricts high-level players; Treasurer limits stores’ ticket sales" by Andrea Estes, Globe Staff / August 2, 2011
State Treasurer Steven Grossman severely restricted yesterday the number of Cash WinFall lottery tickets any store can sell in a day, closing a loophole that has allowed a handful of high-stakes gamblers to win most of the prizes.
Just three gambling companies collected 1,105 of the 1,605 Cash WinFall prizes statewide after a May drawing, each following a strategy that involved buying hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of the $2 tickets at selected stores over a few days.
Under the new rules, no store will be allowed to sell more than $5,000 worth of Cash WinFall tickets in a single day, making it much harder for the gamblers to continue their high-volume purchases.
Grossman also said that Cash WinFall, which has seen declining sales since it was introduced in 2004, will be phased out next spring as part of the normal rotation of games....
Grossman was reacting to a Sunday Globe story that said that sophisticated gamblers had found a quirk in Cash WinFall’s rules that virtually guarantees they will make a large profit if they buy more than $100,000 worth of tickets at certain times of the year when prizes are four to 10 times larger than normal.
Those times, called “rolldown weeks,’’ take place when the Cash WinFall jackpot grows to roughly $2 million and no ticket wins the jackpot by matching six randomly chosen numbers. The jackpot money is then distributed among the secondary prize-winning tickets, increasing the payoff....
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Let me check my numbers:
"A game with a windfall for a knowing few; High-rolling gamblers are exploiting a quirk in Cash WinFall, raking in huge profits every 3 months as the Lottery looks on" by Andrea Estes and Scott Allen, Globe Staff / July 31, 2011
SUNDERLAND - Billy’s Beer and Wine sold exactly $47 worth of lottery tickets the day before Marjorie Selbee arrived, just another sleepy day for the liquor store in this tiny Western Massachusetts town. But from the moment the 70-something woman from Michigan entered the store early July 12, Billy’s wasn’t sleepy anymore.
Just down the road, and I've been by there many times.
Over the next three days, Selbee bought $307,000 worth of $2 tickets for a relatively obscure game called Cash WinFall, tying up the machine that spits out the pink tickets for hours at a time. Down the road at Jerry’s Place, a coffee shop in South Deerfield, Selbee’s husband, Gerald, was also spending $307,000 on Cash WinFall. Together, the couple bought more than 300,000 tickets for a game whose biggest prize - about $2 million - has been claimed exactly once in the game’s seven-year history.
I know just where it is, dear readers.
But the Selbees, who run a gambling company called GS Investment Strategies, know a secret about the Massachusetts State Lottery: For a few days about every three months, Cash WinFall may be the most reliably lucrative lottery game in the country. Because of a quirk in the rules, when the jackpot reaches roughly $2 million and no one wins, payoffs for smaller prizes swell dramatically, which statisticians say practically assures a profit to anyone who buys at least $100,000 worth of tickets.
The state is lucky if I buy one.
During these brief periods - “rolldown weeks’’ in gambling parlance - a tiny group of savvy bettors, among them highly trained computer scientists from MIT and Northeastern University, virtually take over the game....
Sounds like the BANKS of WALL STREET!!
“Cash WinFall isn’t being played as a game of chance. Some smart people have figured out how to get rich while everyone else funds their winnings,’’ said Mohan Srivastava, an MIT-educated statistician who gained fame in gambling circles when he found a flaw in a Canadian scratch ticket game that allowed him to pick the winners more than 90 percent of the time.
Yup, it's a STATE GOVERNMENT operation.
It is hard to say precisely how much each gambler has won because they have a year to claim prizes and the lottery does not track winning tickets of less than $600. But the Selbees have already claimed nearly $1 million in prize money this year, entirely in tickets valued at $802 to $24,821. Their final haul will undoubtedly be considerably larger.
Srivastava calculated that a gambler who bought 200,000 Cash WinFall tickets during four rolldown weeks in a year would win enough to cover the $1.6 million investment and earn a profit of $240,000 to $1.4 million - without ever winning the jackpot. Srivistava’s calculations suggest that the top five groups and individuals playing Cash WinFall collectively win back the cost of their tickets plus $1 million to $6 million in profits each year from about 12 days of gambling.
If only I had the cash reserves like a bank.
On the other 350-plus days of the year, less-sophisticated Cash WinFall players generally lose money, their losses building up the multimillion dollar pool that is ultimately paid out during the rolldowns.
But THAT is OKAY because SUCKERS like them are responsible for the GOBS of STATE AID you get!
The high-stakes players’ dominance of Cash WinFall is putting an uncomfortable spotlight on the state lottery, which has known about the phenomenon for years but only recently started to police the game under new state Treasurer Steven Grossman.
Meaning Cahill the Corrupt was asleep at the switch.
Cash WinFall is so lucrative to stores that sell the tickets - which get a commission equal to 5 percent of the sales - that some are tempted to break the rules to accommodate the high rollers’ needs.
Behaving just like Wall Street!
A Globe reporter saw Marjorie Selbee behind the counter at Billy’s, apparently operating the Cash WinFall machine in violation of a lottery rule that store employees alone can work the ticket dispenser.
I'm so glad those crack Globe reporters are out investigating things, aren't you?
Within days, the lottery suspended ticket-selling privileges at Billy’s, Jerry’s, and five other stores after agency inspectors discovered violations, such as printing out Cash WinFall tickets for bettors who were not there.
So the GLOBE REPORTER is a SNITCH, huh?
However, lottery officials stressed that stores did not tamper with the machines that generate the tickets or otherwise aid the gamblers.
“It is very important to note that their actions in no way compromised the operation or integrity of the game,’’ said lottery officials in a statement.
Pfffft!
More broadly, some question why the state would sponsor a game that is vulnerable to betting tactics that funnel most of the prize money to just a few....
That is the way the RUN FISCAL POLICY for EVERYTHING!
But lottery officials say the game is successful, generating a respectable $11.8 million in profits in 2011 even though the agency sometimes pays out more money than it takes in during the rolldown weeks. Lottery officials say they more than offset the cost of rolldown weeks over the rest of the year.
That is why they DON'T CARE about the FIX!
“It’s a niche game for a different audience,’’ explained Paul Sternburg, the lottery’s executive director. “You want to bring in as many players as possible. Some people chase a huge jackpot. Others are looking at odds.’’
You mean, like a CYBERCAFE?
One thing is certain, however: The players who invest big money in Cash WinFall do not want to talk about it, refusing to discuss the game or explain the secret of their success. Mark Fettig of Tennessee, one of the top 10 winners during the May rolldown week, urged the Globe not to write a story at all, saying “it would be immoral’’ to attract more people to Cash WinFall and potentially dilute the winnings of current players....
I NEVER SAW a WORD of CONCERN about GAMBLING ADDICTS and the DESTROYED FAMILIES and COMMUNITIES!
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Looks like you are a loser, readers. Sorry.
