LARRY LESSER’S

LOTTERY LITERACY!

BACKGROUND:

In 1993, while I was a mathematics education doctoral student at the University of Texas at Austin, I saw and heard lots of lottery misconceptions around town and felt called to teach a UT adult education course I created about the psychology and probability underlying the then-months-old Texas Lottery. The course happened to attract massive media coverage --  from a story spanning 37 column inches in the August 28 Austin American-Statesman all the way to the lead "Dollars and Sense" segment throughout that weekend's Cable News Network (CNN) Headline News!   Subsequent stories have often accompanied the times lotteries begin new games or amass particularly big jackpots, including interviews by Houston's KTRH-AM, Atlanta's WGST-AM, Houston’s KFNC-FM, Austin's ABC-affiliate KVUE-TV, and the national magazines (June 2005)Real Simple and (December 2005) Bottom Line Retirement. I most recently taught this course for PACE at the University of Texas at El Paso in 2006.

ARTICLES I wrote for educators:

* (Winter 2004). Take a Chance by Exploring the Statistics in Lotteries. Statistics Teacher Network, No. 65, 6-7. The issue is also available at: http://www.amstat.org/education/stn/pdfs/STN65.pdf. This article gives intuition for the magnitude of the MegaMillions jackpot probability at that time (on 6/22/05, the jackpot probability became even smaller: 1/175,711,536) and then goes on to show how a lottery can be used to explore (with a TI-83 calculator) all the major topics of an introductory statistics course.

* (Fall 2003). A Whole Lotto Education! Texas Mathematics Teacher, 50(2), 12-15. The issue is also available at http://www.tenet.edu/tctm/downloads/journal_fall03.pdf. This article describes classroom explorations of the interpretation and calculation of probabilities involved in Lotto Texas. TI-83 calculator commands are given for simulating drawings as well as for calculating relevant probabilities using the binomial, geometric, Poisson, and other distributions.

* (November 1997). Exploring Lotteries with Excel. Spreadsheet User, 4(2), 4-7. Spreadsheets are used to explore the lottery, addressing common misconceptions about various lottery "strategies" and probabilities and providing real-world applications of topics such as discrete probability distributions, combinatorics, sampling, simulation and expected value.  Additional pedagogical issues are also discussed.  Examples discussed include the probability that an integer appearing in consecutive drawings, the probability that a single 6-ball drawing includes at least two consecutive integers, the probability that exactly one person wins the jackpot, and the probability that a frequent player eventually wins the jackpot.

LETTERS I wrote for mass media include:

6/12/04 Houston Chronicle and 5/14/93 Austin Chronicle

Lottery education SONG I wrote:

“The Gambler”(http://www.math.utep.edu/Faculty/lesser/thegambler.html) addresses strategies and myths for playing a state lottery, and may be sung to the tune of the same-titled Don Schlitz song that yielded Kenny Rogers a #1 country hit and TV miniseries. Appeared in Winter 2002 Stats, Fall 2003 Texas Mathematics Teacher, and January 2005 Journal of Irreproducible Results.

Official Lottery WEBSITES:

Texas Lottery Commission website: http://www.txlottery.org

Lotto Texas: http://www.txlottery.org/online/lotto.cfm

MegaMillions: http://www.txlottery.org/online/megamillion.cfm or http://www.megamillions.com/

New Mexico Lottery website: http://www.nmlottery.com/

PowerBall: http://www.powerball.com/

MISCELLANEOUS:

Where money goes: http://www.txlottery.org/faq/moneygoes.cfm

How to Win More: Strategies for Increasing a Lottery Win, the only book about lotteries I’ve found so far that I’d recommend to anyone: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1568810784/002-6149190-5012835?v=glance&n=283155

Lottery scams: http://www.txlottery.org/news/lottoscam_how.cfm

“Straight Dope” on lottery strategy (http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a4_119.html) and prize payouts (http://www.straightdope.com/mailbag/mlottery.html)

See if you can find misconceptions here: http://www.smartluck.com/locations/tips/tx544.htm

Some ways lotteries reply to their critics: http://www.nmlottery.com/Miscellaneous/CRITIQUE.HTM and http://www.naspl.org/faq.html and http://www.nmlottery.com/Miscellaneous/facts_myths.htm

One way to make your own “quick-pick” of numbers: http://www.random.org/sform.html

Want a “scratch-off experience” at no cost? http://www.txlottery.org/scratchoffs/playdemo.cfm?gameid=690

some articles for math lovers: http://www.lottery.state.mn.us/hypergeo.html, www.amstat.org/publications/jse/v2n2/wasserstein.html, www.amstat.org/publications/jse/v13n2/mecklin.html, www.amstat.org/publications/jse/secure/v7n3/boland.cfm

Gambling help: http://www.txlottery.org/responsible.cfm

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My UTEP homepage: http://www.math.utep.edu/Faculty/lesser/