It was really exciting, and I made some decisions which turned out to be pretty wise tonight. I turned in $32 worth of winning tickets this evening, but had decided to keep $20 of that to apply to a hard drive(s) that I have been considering buying. The clerk said that the Jingle Jumbo Bucks had been doing good, but also mentioned that they only have one big winner per pack usually. I asked him where the winners were mostly, in the middle, beginning or end. He said it was usually closer to either end, but not as often in the middle.
As fast as those tickets go, I am guessing that I should probably avoid the rest of that roll anyway, but I did win $10 right next to $150 once. I bet the Lottery does that every so often, to encourage folks to buy the tickets after the winner. The sobering thing is that had I just scratched off the ticket that won for $10, I probably would have not bought the next ticket, and I would have chosen something else out of the machine. If I had done that, I would have been $150 poorer. Now if someone asks me how much I spent to win $150, and I can say nothing (the $10 winner technically paid for itself, and the $150 winner next to it).
Last night, I bought two Holiday Gifts, 027 and 026, and two Super 6 tickets (even though I know $1 tickets are a waste, I still buy them occasionally, because one time I won $100 on one). I lost on all of them, so I had to decide whether to keep the money I had left, so that I could still afford the hard drive that I wanted, or spend more, with the risk that if I lost I would not have the money I had set aside for that purchase. What I did I would usually advise against, but it worked out well this time.
I decided to buy another Holiday Gifts, seeing as how I have very rarely gone more than three without a win. It won a ticket, so I had to decide what to do next. That #029 Jingle Jumbo kept calling out to me, so I traded in the winning ticket along with a $5 bill for it, and it won, so now I can consider an even later generation hard drive. I am torn between a number of possibilities. I am considering building a new computer one piece at a time, but that might be a bad idea as fast as technology improves. This computer was nearly a supercomputer when it was new, but by today's standards, it is not too impressive.
I like to buy things that last with my proceeds from the lotto, as a reminder of how well I have done in the past. That also keeps me from blowing the winnings on more tickets. It is so easy to waste all of the money that you win on more tickets. If you do it long enough, you are guaranteed to lose every penny! I even read one fellow on here that thought he was doing good, because he kept winning free tickets and smaller prizes. He kept on playing more, until he had no more money left. He would only play $1 tickets, because after all, that would allow him 5 chances to play against one chance to play on a $5 ticket. He seemed to think that the more times he got to play off of his initial investment, the better he was doing!!!
The next to last time I won big, $150 this past Monday, I spent like a drunken sailor on tickets. I went from being ahead $98 for the month on Monday, to being ahead by only $37 Friday morning, but then I won this, so now I am back ahead by $115 for the month on scratch-offs, but I don't know what I will do. I will definitely slow down. The sensible part of me wants to back off for a while, while I am still ahead. I also know that I have won $150 and $100 on tickets this week alone, and have cashed in around $500 worth of winners since the beginning of the month. If I had been a little smarter (or luckier), I could have possibly had a much larger profit.
I am still very interested in determining the relationship between the ticket number, the book number, the game number, and the serial number. I am also trying to decode the three letters on the front. Some of them make sense. FIV is five, SEV is seven, TIC is ticket, TEN is ten, and the letters can be in any order. After that it gets tricky. For example, my $100 winner on Jingle Jumbo Bucks had the exact same letters as a $20 winner on Holiday Gifts. Some letters seem to be the same amongst winners of the same amount, but not all of the time; it is not consistent. It might have to do with black present, red present, or sleigh on Holiday Gifts, for example. I guess it will take a very large sample to know for sure. Unfortunately, I have turned in a lot of the winners without recording all of the information on the ticket, mainly from my early days of playing.
If there was only one thing I could teach a new lottery player, it would be to record every single purchase that you make, and keep the tickets. Most clerks will let you keep the winners after you cash them in, if you ask[1]. Record every bit of information that you can from that ticket: the full ticket number, the full serial number, the three letter code on the front, the winning information (which symbol, if a symbol game), the date and location purchased. I study tickets, especially losers leading up to winners, both before and after, if I have them. That way I can see if there is a pattern that leads to discovering a winner. Do this whether or not you decide to keep the winner, and do it before you turn it in.
Don't forget to record the cost of the tickets, both winners and losers, and subtract that from the winnings. I keep a daily record of every ticket. I also keep a month to date and year to date tally of what I have spent, and my winnings (and losses). I have sections for instant games and draw games. I record every ticket in an Excel file. In some cases (games that I play a lot), I record them on their own page. Otherwise, I group them by ticket price. I use Excel, and a diary program: iDailyDiary. I got it free off of download.com, and it is a fantastic product for recording your daily purchases and winnings. I have taken to scanning in a lot of my winners, especially the larger ones. That way, even if I were to forget to sign a ticket, and a clerk was to dishonestly maintain that he was the winner, I would have proof that I was the rightful owner.
My largest wins on scratch-offs are $40, $50, $100, and $150. I have won Cash 3, three Sundays in a row, but they were not in exact order so I only won $40 on each ticket. The most I have won on Fantasy 5 is around $20 or $30 at once, along with some free quick picks. I have stopped playing draw games for now, and that has allowed me to lose money at a more slow and controlled rate. I am concentrating on a few tickets now, and trying to get good at them. Now it is time for me to work on that $500 or greater win!
I have just discovered Kings & Queens (overall odds of 1 in 4.00), and it has odds like Holiday Gifts (overall odds of 1 in 3.99). Hopefully it will play the same, if not better. It just came out. After reading that another person here won $2,500 on it, I am surely going to give it a shot. That was in Ohio I assume, but I am not sure if it is the same here, where it is a $5 game. I can't wait to see how many top prizes there are, but I will most likely not be able to get that information until around the week of Christmas.
It has a top payout of $400,000. That is even better than Holiday Gifts, which has a top payout of $250,000. I am only guessing that it will have fewer small prizes than Holiday Gifts to make up for the difference. Up until book number 200,000, payouts were usually pretty good and fairly consistent for Holiday Gifts. I won the $150 on a book in the upper 190,000 range. I need to look for more out there. My guess is a slower store. My experience has unfortunately been that the prizes are getting smaller after book 200,000, and possibly fewer in between, but only time will tell. Perhaps it is only wise to play a game for the first couple of months that it is out.
OK was that a long enough post? Sometimes I just can't seem to quit typing. OK, that's it for now. Perhaps I should become an author.
1. ˆI watched in horror as this one nonchalantly tore up my $150 winning ticket after I had just gotten through telling him that I wanted to keep it as a souvenir. I will always be extremely bitter towards this worthless piece of . I should quit shopping there on principal alone, and I still might, but I just won $100 there, so I probably won't. I guess the right thing to do is cash all of my winners elsewhere, so that store does not get any bonus off of any of my tickets. I will definitely need to purchase all of my jackpot tickets elsewhere. I need to go dig through their trash, but it is probably too late. I wonder how he would feel if he someone destroyed something of great sentimental value to him? That was after all my biggest win. It is just festering inside me, eating me away. I guess I should feel fortunate that that is the worst thing anyone has done to me recently, but it just burns me up. I hope that he is never stranded on the side of the road in a remote area, because I would surely pass him by. I wouldn't piss on him if he were on fire. At least I still have a very high quality scanned image of it (9,600 dpi, it is saved as both a 228 MB .png file, and a "smaller" 171 MB .jpg file)
