Playing the Lotto: ZOMG It's Riggedz

I was reading an interesting article about a two year old study that shows that poor people spend approximately 9% of their wages buying lottery tickets. I’ve always felt that this was the cruelest joke in the online gambling debate. Everyone who knows anything about the lottery system knows that poor people are the biggest purchasers of lottery tickets. And best off, the government runs the numbers! The same politicians that say stuff like “click your mouse and lose your house” are perfectly happy to also say “buy a quick pick before they evict.”

Anyway, I wasn’t writing to rant about the lottery system but one of the comments had me rolling. Greg said:

I found out from a state lottery employee that half the time the lottery is rigged so no one wins. You see the computer knows every combo played so they easily know what numbers to draw. She said about half the time its rigged. I said arent you worried telling me this I will tell and she said no one will believe me anyways so go ahead you have no proof. Basically she said they had no choice the state budget is so broke and playing the lottery honest didnt bring in enough money but rigging it increased profits big time to balance the state budget. So if you read this and still play the lottery you are an idiot.

So they’re rigging the lottery now too? 200,000,000 to 1 odds wasn’t good enough for them so they felt a need to make the odds of winning even worse?

I’m 99.99999% sure this guy is full of sh*t but it just goes to show that when people can’t win something they think they should they automatically assume that there is some conspiracy going on. I mean, if you ran it legit and then rigged it, wouldn’t some academic or consumer protection watchdog not notice a huge spike in profits on relatively flat sales?