LARRY LESSER’S LOTTERY
LITERACY!
Executive summary: Dr.
Larry Lesser is a Professor
in the math department at The University of Texas at El Paso, where he has
been since 2004. To help people make informed decisions about how/if they play
lotteries, he’s given lectures, written journal articles and letters, and even
made an award-winning video/song. Since 1993, his lottery outreach work
has received coverage from CNN, Bottom
Line Retirement, Real Simple, and
many newspapers, TV and radio stations.
BACKGROUND:
In 1993, while a math 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 an adult education course
(for UT-Austin Informal Classes) 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, 1993 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 for radio (e.g., Denver’s KHOW-AM, Houston’s
KTRH-AM, Atlanta’s WGST-AM, Houston’s KFNC-FM, Austin’s KUT-FM, San Antonio’s
WOAI-AM), TV (e.g., Austin’s ABC-affiliate KVUE-TV, El Paso’s KFOX-TV
and KVIA-TV) and national magazines (e.g., June 2005 Real Simple and December 2005 Bottom
Line Retirement). At The University of Texas at El Paso, I taught an
updated version of this course for PACE
in 2006 and gave a lecture for UTEP’s first Centennial Open House in
2014.
In my interview
in the March 30, 2012 El Paso Times
discussing that day’s drawing for a record $640 million Mega Millions jackpot,
I offered these three ways to help the public visualize those 1 in 176 million
odds: “Imagine guessing a particular sheet
of typing paper from a stack that’s 11 miles high….Another way to imagine it is
to try to remember one particular second from a 5.5-year time period or guess a
particular square inch from an area that's bigger than 21 football fields,
including end zones.” I’ve updated and
added new concrete analogies when odds are changed for games (e.g., when
interviewed by KUT-FM’s Trey Shaar on Dec. 17, 2013 2 months after Mega
Millions odds steepened). I was subsequently again in
the El Paso Times and on El Paso TV stations such as
CBS-affiliate KDBC-TV, ABC-affiliate KVIA-TV (watch
clip), KFOX-TV, and NBC-affiliate KTSM.
(For more examples of TV coverage, see https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLdfaHtJTO4LKgr_zJxqjDFIbMqqucwEqr
.)
Some tips: Contrary to what many scams out there claim,
there are NO strategies to increase an individual ticket’s chance of winning a
share of the jackpot. By choosing
less-played numbers, however, you may share the jackpot with fewer people IF
you win. And although the chance of ever winning is dauntingly miniscule, keep
in mind that a lottery ticket (1) gives more hours of daydream fantasy per
dollar spent than a matinee, and (2) is not the only thing people buy that
loses money on average (e.g., consider insurance).
SONG I wrote to educate general
public about lotteries: “The Gambler” (http://www.causeweb.org/resources/fun/db.php?id=50) 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; this song was a winner
in the fall 2015 math song contest sponsored by the National Museum of
Mathematics (which invited me to perform the song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dVh3Dcr57r0) and was featured on The Ross Kaminsky
Show.
VIDEO on my statistics education outreach on
the lottery: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PxGRghzr5zo
(this video won first place
in the SIGMAA-QL’s national
2011-12 “QL in the media” contest and the “Best Online Submission” prize in
the 2014 ASA’s Got
Talent competition sponsored by the American Statistical Association.
ARTICLES I wrote for educators:
*
(March 2013). Letter to the Editor: The
odds of academic usage of statistics terms in everyday contexts such as
lotteries. Journal of Statistics
Education, 21(1), 1-5. https://amstat.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/10691898.2013.11889670?needAccess=true
* (Sept. 2012). Lottery
Lunacy. Mathematics Teacher, 106(2), 93-94. http://www.nctm.org/publications/article.aspx?id=33965 Using the
motivating vehicle of a comic strip, this column uses classroom-ready questions
to explore the reality of lottery-playing “strategies” such as tracking,
wheeling, and pooling.
* (Winter 2004). Take a
Chance by Exploring the Statistics in Lotteries. Statistics
Teacher Network, No. 65, 6-7. The issue
is also available at https://ww2.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. This article describes classroom
explorations of the interpretation and calculation of probabilities involved in
Lotto Texas. TI-83/84 calculator
commands are given for simulating drawings as well as for calculating relevant
probabilities using the binomial, geometric, Poisson, and other distributions.
* (Nov. 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.
* I’ve also published related letters in the August 2011 Mathematics Teacher and in mass media such as the Austin Chronicle (5/14/93), Houston Chronicle (6/12/04), El Paso Times (11/4/10), etc.
Official
Lottery WEBSITES:
Mega Millions: http://www.megamillions.com/
PowerBall: http://www.powerball.com/
Texas Lottery Commission: http://www.txlottery.org
Lotto Texas: http://www.txlottery.org/export/sites/lottery/Games/Lotto_Texas/index.html
New Mexico Lottery: http://www.nmlottery.com/
MISCELLANEOUS:
2-minute movie with
lottery/probability: https://www.causeweb.org/resources/fun/db.php?id=226
Where Texas Lottery money goes: http://www.txlottery.org/export/sites/lottery/Supporting_Education/
“Straight Dope” on strategy (http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a4_119.html)
and prize payouts (http://www.straightdope.com/mailbag/mlottery.html)
How to
Win More: Strategies for Increasing a Lottery Win, probably the only book on lotteries I’ve found so
far that I’d recommend: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1568810784/002-6149190-5012835?v=glance&n=283155
Lottery scams: http://www.txlottery.org/export/sites/lottery/About_Us/Security_Spotlight/
find any misconceptions here? http://www.smartluck.com/locations/tips/tx544.htm
How some people try to defend lotteries: http://www.naspl.org/
One way to make your own “quick-pick” of
numbers: http://www.random.org/sform.html
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/export/sites/lottery/Misc/Play_Responsibly.html
http://www.ehow.com/how_5500755_quit-lottery-ticket-gambling-addiction.html
Shirley
Jackson’s famous 1948 short story called “The Lottery”: http://www.americanliterature.com/Jackson/SS/TheLottery.html;
here’s a video adaptation by Larry Yust broken
into 2 nine-minute clips:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pIm93Xuij7k
then http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PMhV3fwx5Sg
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My UTEP homepage: http://www.math.utep.edu/Faculty/lesser/