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Comment by mtremsal | Hacker News Reader

IIRC the remaining risk lies in multiple people winning or attempting arbitrage simultaneously, thus dividing the expected revenue by the number of winners. So not a free lunch.

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IIRC, there was at least one case where the lottery got wise that this was happening and refused to sell the parties involved any more tickets. They had enough tickets for better than even odds, but not a guarantee. IIRC, they won.

On its face this sounds like it makes sense but why would the lottery care, at all? They get money per ticket, a story that buying lots of tickets increases your chances of winning, it's win win win for them.

I believe it's a marketing/psychology thing - people like to hear stories about how people like them won (busy person wins big from inexpensive last minute purchase) because they can relate and are more likely to buy a ticket in the next draw. Hearing that some international syndicate with big money and clever mathematicians won makes the everyman think that a big win is out of reach for them.

I remember a 1990s lottery event in which a "buy all combinations" was attempted, but their physical machines they acquired were partially deficient, and they simply couldn't physically acquire enough tickets in time (as the procedure was relatively time intensive), but they still won with something like a 75% probability of success

I've heard of this happening, but it was 20+ years ago and so I'm not sure how to look this up.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20144870#20145422

The link therein has suffered link rot, try: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Lottery_%28Ireland%29...

Fortunately the Internet Archive has a copy in the Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20190611150403/https://www.msn.c...

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