Carpe Datum

Play Big, Win Big

I stopped off to get gas the other day and thought I would surprise my sweetie. I found out a couple of months ago that she used to play the scratch-off lottery Bingo game back home, so I thought I would get her one. The way these things work is that you scratch off an area of the card with a bunch of bingo numbers. As each number comes up, you can mark it on one of six player cards on the big game card. Lines, "X" or four corner patterns are worth different amounts on each card.

Mathematically, of course, it's a loser. It's just a fancy way of paying out about 80 cents for every dollar spent on the cards. As the saying goes, the lottery is a tax on people who are bad at math. Then again, you don't just play it to try to get rich. You play for the fun of trying to get rich, even knowing it doesn't work. I buy lottery tickets once in a while, just to pay for the fun of hoping that my life gets ruined by a $20 million lump sum payout.

The payouts on scratch off games are more frequent but worth much less. I had bought a few $2 bingo cards for the kids to stuff in their stockings, which is how this all started. Well, off those three cards, the kids won $24. So now they're all hot for more bingo cards, but I'm severely limiting those purchases. I think they can learn the lesson of expected value in this case without actually losing all that money. Once in a while, maybe one a month, fine.

So when I went to the store to buy a $2 ticket for Michelle, they were all out. So Apu behind the counter tells me they have the $5 bingo card. It plays the same as the $2 card, but it has bigger payouts. "Play big, win big!" he said. I got a good laugh out of that, because I swear he sounded just like Apu from "The Simpsons", and that sold me. So I brought it home, and Michelle won $10 off the card.

Now I abhor Valentine's Day. It's a commercialized pressure-cooker of crap that has caused me endless suffering when I was without a significant other and no small amount of suffering otherwise. But Michelle is cool with it. I don't wait for V Day to do something nice for my sweetie. But today I decided to get her a "bouquet" of bingo tickets.

Well, we scratched them all off. What an unholy mess of silver shavings. We only won $5. So in total, we've probably bought about $35 in bingo cards now and we've won about $41. Probably time to call it quits (actually, the time to call it quits was when we spent $6 and won $24, but it's so easy to play when you're "ahead").

Posted by Observer at February 15, 2005 07:05 AM