2 Texans Down Under

Australia has a lottery called the Saturday Gold Lotto game and on television you can watch, if you wish, randomly selected ping pong balls with numbers on them jump around and then settle, one by one, into a chute. Many hundreds of people, I presume, are waiting each time to see if destiny is finally about to give them the wealth they have for so long so richly deserved.

I bought a lottery ticket once, back in Texas. It was one of those multi-million-jackpot nights when long lines of people were in front of every convenience store cash register, waiting to buy the fateful stubs by the handful. I succumbed. I bought one.

But then I got sleepy before the balls began to bounce on television, so I gave my ticket (100 per cent, no strings attached) to my son-in-law, Scott, and went off to bed. My generosity, after all, knows no bounds. At breakfast the next morning, the first thing Scott said to me was, “You didn’t have a single number right.”

Well, now, what are the odds of that?

Tuesday’s Brisbane “Courier Mail” newspaper ran a story on lottery statistics headlined, appropriately I thought, “Sorry, wrong number.” By Graham Readfearn and quoting frequently from Professor Rodney Wolff of the Queensland University of Technology (QUT), the story says the chances of a single ticket winning an Australian Saturday Gold Lotto jackpot are one in 14 million.

Okay, not quite that high. Wolff says the odds are actually Read the rest of this entry »