![]() ![]() Over the next few years, playing the lottery became a full-time job for Harvey. About 50 people chipped in for the first batch of tickets-raising $1,000 in total-and tripled their money when their numbers came up. In February 2005, Harvey formed a betting group with some of his fellow MIT students. ![]() In fact, the expected payoff was sometimes positive: When a roll-down happened, there was at least $2.30 waiting in prize money for every $2.00 ticket sold. ![]() People soon spotted that the odds of winning money were far better in a roll-down week than at other times, which meant ticket sales always surged before these draws.Īs he studied the game, Harvey realized that it was easier to make money on WinFall than on other lotteries. When the estimated jackpot reached $2 million, players knew that the money would roll-down if nobody matched six numbers. If the prize money rose to $2 million without a winner, the jackpot would “roll-down” and instead be split among the players who had matched three, four, or five numbers.īefore each draw, the lottery published its estimate for the jackpot, which was based on ticket sales from previous draws. They decided that WinFall would avoid this awkward situation by limiting the jackpot. Massachusetts Lottery faced precisely that challenge in 2003, when its Mass Millions game went without a winner for an entire year. And if no smiling faces and giant checks appear in the newspapers for a while, people might stop playing. The problem with rollovers is that winners-who are good publicity for a lottery-can be rare. If there’s no winning ticket next time, it rolls over again and continues to do so until somebody eventually matches all the numbers. However, it had one important difference: Usually, when nobody wins the jackpot in a lottery, the prize rolls over to the next draw. In many ways, WinFall was like all the other lottery games. The lottery designed the game so that $1.20 of every $2.00 would be paid out in prizes, with the rest being spent on local good causes. If they matched some but not all the numbers, they won a smaller sum. If they matched all six in the draw, they won a jackpot of at least half a million dollars. Players would choose six numbers for each two-dollar ticket. He began analyzing well-known lottery games such as Powerball and MegaMillions, but soon became intrigued by Cash WinFall, a game that was introduced in 2004 and was unique to the state of Massachusetts. While searching for a topic, he became interested in lotteries. James Harvey was nearing the completion of his mathematics degree and needed a project for his final semester. In 2005, another plan started to take shape in the corridors of Random Hall. One is called Destiny, a result of its cash-strapped inhabitants selling the naming rights on eBay the winning bid was $36 from a man who wanted to name it after his daughter. According to campus legend, the students who first lived there in 1968 wanted to call the dorm “Random House” until the publishing house with that same name sent them a letter to object. Even within a university as famously offbeat as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Random Hall has a reputation for being a little quirky.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |