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Comment by unethical_ban | Hacker News Reader

Step back from "legal" and think about what most people expect the lottery to be: Regular people buying somewhere between 1-100 (maybe, if in a big work pool or something) tickets to try to win a low-chance lottery.

Further, as I read it, the cartel bought all combinations of numbers, so there was no risk for them.

Ask yourself if you think this is something that should happen every time the jackpot goes above $25,000,000 - or if the lottery could survive with people knowing this was happening.

It clearly is against the spirit of the game, and any competent lotto administrator would see the red flags in facilitating it.

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There was still risk to them. If anybody else had a winning ticket, they only get half the prize. If two people had winning tickets, they'd have lost money on the venture.

People still see it as weird that somebody can guarantee a "win", but their expected returns on a dollar are the same as anybody else's -- and it's still negative. It nonetheless unnerves people that the prize can reach a point where it is mote than the cost of a complete set of tickets.

They say that lotteries are a tax on people bad at math. This is yet another example, though this time it works against the people running the lottery. The house still wins, but fewer people want to play.

> It clearly is against the spirit of the game

The spirit of the game is to create a tax on the poor and middle class without calling it a tax.

While true, that does not negate my point.

The state still collected their taxes, so it still feels within the spirit of the game.

Is that really your thought process? Do you not see the problem for both people and for the long-term funding of the Texas Lotto if this kind of thing were continuously possible? Can you not acknowledge that, despite the fundraising mechanism of the lotto, people expect it to operate a certain way?

> Do you not see the problem for both people and for the long-term funding of the Texas Lotto if this kind of thing were continuously possible?

I don't think it's a problem for the lotto to not exist.

As for the underlying problem, if they're worried about this being a long-term issue for the viability of their tax, then they should change the odds to make it non-viable to buy all tickets.

There's nothing against the spirit of a gambling game that is poorly setup, unless it's explicitly made illegal.

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