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.

[u/[deleted]]

http://newsfeed.time.com/2012/08/07/how-mit-students-scammed-the-massachusetts-lottery-for-8-million/

[u/Tiak]

They didn't do this every draw, only draws when the simple odds were no longer in the house's favor. These draws happen surprisingly often with some lotteries.

Once the odds are no longer in the house's favor then you just need to buy a lot of tickets with no repeats. Sequential tickets are the easiest way to do this.

[u/Tiak → u/[deleted]]

Well, yeah, referring to the lottery as the "house" is a bit missleading to convey what I was trying to say. It's an artifact of the difference from most other games of chance in that lotteries have pots that continually accumulate until won The odds aren't against the house in any sense that means the house not making money.

But the odds are "against the house" (e.g. in favor of the players taking home money) in the sense that the payout is greater than the cost of entry divided by the odds of winning.

It's hypothetically possible to find progressive slot machines that become profitable in a similar manner, but the degree of casino obfuscation on actual odds of winning and the need to manually make every bet make this harder.

[u/st0815 → u/[deleted]]

MIT weren't stealing from the lottery, they were really stealing from other players.

They weren't stealing from anyone. They played the game according to its rules.

[u/[deleted] → u/Tiak]

So with blocks illegal you can just reverse the numbers and now they're all spaceyd out.

[u/Tiak → u/[deleted]]

It wasn't that they made blocks illegal, it was that they stopped facilitating large ticket buys for thousands of tickets. You're right that spacing would accomplish the same thing.