A Secretive Gambler Called 'The Joker' Took Down the Texas Lottery | Hacker News Reader

A Secretive Gambler Called 'The Joker' Took Down the Texas Lottery

wsj.com

31 pointswallflower12 comments

Serious gambling in most industries like casinos, NFTs, F2P and PTW games is all driven by whales[0]. Horse racing has been taken over by math whales, too. The house knows the small fish are only there as food for the whales.

[0] Source: I'm a former dev at an NFT/F2P game studio owned by a large slot machine maker.

To your point... My dad once told me a story he'd heard about a casino that booked the hottest TV stars of 1979 to be the headlining show at their casino. Donnie & Marie Osmond. But despite the sold-out shows, they regretted the decision because it was such a family-friendly audience that almost nobody stuck around to bet big sums of money in the casino.

The point of the story was that casinos like to make their money from big spenders losing big chunks of money. So much so that it affects decisions they make about which acts to book.

TIL: Celine Dion's fans are all gambling addicts?

They probably gamble more than Donnie and Marie fans (and probably order more drinks).

But I think you have to think of whales as high-bankrolled foreign tourists who want the opportunity to see big international superstars. (Celine Dion "gained international recognition by winning the 1988 Eurovision Song Contest," Wikipedia points out, and has sung "in several other languages including Japanese, Italian, German, Mandarin, Spanish, and Neapolitan...")

> Serious gambling in most industries like casinos, NFTs, F2P and PTW games

I appreciate the accurate framing here.

> NFT/F2P game studio owned by a large slot machine maker

I wonder how common this is. I also wonder about the impact of sports betting apps, which seem to be everywhere.

https://archive.ph/kF1oC

"The game called for picking six numbers from 1 and 54. For a pro gambler, some sets of numbers—such as 1,2,3,4,5,6—aren’t worth picking because so many other players choose them, which would split the pot. Marantelli’s operation bought 99.3% of the possibilities."

Wouldn't this be 54x53x52x51x50x49 = 18,595,558,800 therefore 99.3% is 18,465,389,888.4 or basically over 18 billion dollars in tickets (at $1 per ticket)?

I also could not work this out.

I think there are a bewildering number of games on the Texas lottery [1] but none seem to give the odds listed. But even more confusingly the Texas lottery itself lists the chance of a jackpot as 1 in 25.8mil [2]. So I’m not sure what we’re missing?!

The 1:26mil number must be about correct as google says the whole lottery grosses about 1.2bn a year. So 100m a month. So about 12.5mil tickets sold per draw if they are twice weekly. So a roughly 50% chance of a jackpot. If it were as our numbers show it would take about 16 years for a jackpot to occur even if that were the only game people played.

1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Lottery

2: https://www.texaslottery.com/export/sites/lottery/Documents/...

I suspect you have to choose the right numbers but not the right order. That makes the numbers work out.

I believe the game in the article is no longer offered. I think it was a regional game with 3 numbers like lucky 7s or whatever.

Order doesn't matter, you need to divide by 6!

Where the final '!' means 'factorial' not just an emphatic 6.

"6 factorial" is 6 x 5 x 4 x 3 x 2 x 1 = 720.

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