How I Beat Scratch-Off Lottery Tickets - Joshua Green - Personal - The Atlantic

How I Beat Scratch-Off Lottery Tickets - Joshua Green - Personal - The Atlantic: "Scratchers are a simple odds game. The tickets come in packs of a couple hundred. Watching alchies scratch tickets all day, you eventually realize that there are a more or less fixed number of winners per pack. You also realize that if the ten tickets just scratched were losers, there's a pretty decent chance one of the next ones will be a winner. So I fell into the habit of buying a couple tickets anytime I witnessed an alchie on a losing streak. I'd scratch 'em off in front of the poor guy, and more often than not, I'd win a few bucks."