When the casino becomes the refuge of the poor rather the playground of the rich

[beancounter]

if the lottery was run so that all the money that was put in was turned to prizes, then over millions of years the return for each dollar you spent on it would be returned. 1 for 1. I mean you wouldn't lose any money.

In the UK a big chunk is taken out for spending on causes, and some for running the thing, so a return on one pound might be 30pence, I don't know exactly.

The whole point of a lottery (or gambling in general) is for the people running the game to make money. Passing it out on a 1:1 ratio would be a very ineffecient means of wealth distribtion, and would provide no incentive for anyone to run said lottery, because the administrative cost would have to be absorbed by some third party in order to achieve a 1:1 payout.

 

[Blobbenstein]

yes, I know that.

 

[das_nut]

there was a clever play about gambling I heard years ago. I guy gets an anonymous letter through the post saying that a specific horse is going to win a race, and later the horse wins. He then gets a second letter saying that another horse is going to win, and then it does, after this letter or similar letters he gets a letter saying that to get the name of the next horse to win the guy should send a large amount of money to the letter sender.
The clever bit is that the letter sender had been sending out letters to hundreds of people with all the horses that were running, and if the horse lost he would send no more letters to that person, only to the the people where the horse he named won....clever con, I thought.

A similar scam was in an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents. The episode was broadcast over 50 years ago. So it's been around for awhile.

Spoiler

The guy ends up (luckily) getting all correct predictions so he doesn't lose anything. But when a curious friend tries to track the person down, they discover it was this scam.

The episode is online, it's called "Mail Order Prophet". Hulu and Youtube both have it. I'm not sure if there's a copyright issue with the Youtube version.

Edited: Watched the episode again, and fixed the spoilers.