Another saga in the world of lottery pools.

"Powco general manager Darrin Manley, one of the winners, said he believes the person making the claim to share the prize has worked at the plant for about 15 years and is on vacation in Poland."

If this person was supposed to be on the list of winners and came back from vacation only to find out his co-workers had claimed the prize, split and spent it without him could upset him.

There seems to be more to this story. I hope we hear more about this, after that guy gets back from his vacation.

Powco general manager Darrin Manley, one of the winners, said he believes the person making the claim to share the prize has worked at the plant for about 15 years and is on vacation in Poland.

"He called me too, and I believe it was an oversight on our part that he was missed on the list," Manley said, adding the group still isn't happy about leaving Toronto without cheques.

This sounds like a sneaky group trying to cash in the ticket while the other pool member was in another country on vacation or a very large group that could forget one person on the list. This is another reason why I say if you must pool, which I don't like because it almost always leads to trouble, use small amounts like 10 people. I don't see how you forget someone who has been working there 15 years unles that person had just joined the pool group recently and people weren't use to them being in the group.

There have been quite a few slogans that have become popular in our time like, "NO JUSTICE, NO PEACE, or "JUST SAY NO TO..."  Well, I put a lottery spin on them that goes like this:  LOTTERY POOL, NO PEACE and JUST SAY NO TO LOTTERY POOLS. 

I see the appeal of lottery pools...the average Joe or Jane figures he or she could just throw in a couple bucks in several different pools, thereby imperceptably but psychologically increasing their chances of winning the big jackpot.  But that is where the scheme crumbles because a person in a pool of say 100 people (hello you Sargento Wisconsin jackpot winners) would feel they have a better chance of winning than a person in a pool of 10 or less participants.  But I think it is bad in the end because, in the case of a single winning ticket, instead of being able to enjoy that entire jackpot (in the case of the Sargento winners, it would have been $200M annuity/$100M cash value), you would only get a fractional share of the jackpot (in their case, they netted about $900,000 before taxes).  So you have happen to you what most people would deem a once in a lifetime occurence that is merely fractionalized just because you decided to participate in a pool.  Now if the winning number in that pool was just a QP, no big deal.  But then again, it could have been a single person who happened to just buy a QP that won just as well.  And it would really suck if the pool won from a small series of numbers that one of the players played all the time prior to joining the pool!  So just say no to pools, be happy when the numbers drawn don't match the ones on your ticket, and be extremely happy when they do!