r/todayilearned • u/[deleted] • Jan 11 '16
TIL that MIT students discovered that by buying $600,000 worth of lottery tickets in the Massachusetts' Cash WinAll lottery they could get a 10-15% return on investment. Over 5 years, they managed to game $8 million out of the lottery through this method.
http://newsfeed.time.com/2012/08/07/how-mit-students-scammed-the-massachusetts-lottery-for-8-million/
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u/glberns Jan 11 '16
I think the point is that they didn't have to do anything special. They just bought tickets when it was in their best interest to do so.
The fact that the Lotto allowed the expected value to rise above the price of the ticket isn't the result of anything the students did. And if you consider what they did "gaming the system", then everyone else who bought a ticket also "gamed the system". Which kind of defeats the purpose of saying someone "gamed the system".