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I asked about QPs in a topic and this was Todd's reply (on page 1).............................
"The Quick Picks are random numbers generated by the lottery terminal itself. They are not drawn from a master list of numbers until the list is exhausted."
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Quote: Originally posted by ryanm on Apr 5, 2013
Oh yeah. It seemed like PB could go broke back in December, when it paid four $50 million jackpots in a row. Those were underfunded by a total of $59 million. PB is REALLY taking a gamble with its $40 million opening jackpot and $10 million minimum increases.
The secondary prize pool was underfunded by $22 million on Wednesday including six players (one using PowerPlay) that matched five numbers. I guess MUSL is betting on extended roll overs for their profits.
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Quote: Originally posted by Ronnie316 on Apr 6, 2013
I asked about QPs in a topic and this was Todd's reply (on page 1).............................
"The Quick Picks are random numbers generated by the lottery terminal itself. They are not drawn from a master list of numbers until the list is exhausted."
Some of the terminals were reprogrammed because they issued duplicate sets of numbers and were sold to one player. It's not the same as from a master list, but it does prevent duplications.
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Stack47
I'm curious to know if you have any info regarding New York's Sweet Million game. Do you know what pecentage of ticket sales is paid out in prizes?
Even though it offers the best odds to win one million dollars, Sweet Million is not well received by NY's lottery playing public. The second tier prizes are low, and due to it's "coverage problem" not many JP's are won, which is something players react negatively to.
IMHO, the game does have it's up-side. The first 5 JP wins are not pari-mutuel. Recently two tickets were sold on the same street in the same town at two different stores. I'm guessing that one player won two million, but perhaps it was more than one person.
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Quote: Originally posted by GiveFive on Apr 7, 2013
Stack47
I'm curious to know if you have any info regarding New York's Sweet Million game. Do you know what pecentage of ticket sales is paid out in prizes?
Even though it offers the best odds to win one million dollars, Sweet Million is not well received by NY's lottery playing public. The second tier prizes are low, and due to it's "coverage problem" not many JP's are won, which is something players react negatively to.
IMHO, the game does have it's up-side. The first 5 JP wins are not pari-mutuel. Recently two tickets were sold on the same street in the same town at two different stores. I'm guessing that one player won two million, but perhaps it was more than one person.
The annual report on the NY Lottery's website is more concise than most state lotteries so I couldn't find the prize winnings to ticket sales percentage. The total ticket sales of Sweet Million is $39,398,339 and the report says of that $20,104,231 went to Educational Aid. Some of the remaining $19 million probably goes to expenses so I'm guessing about 45% of the total sales is paid out in prizes.
The overall chances of winning $1 million is much better playing Sweet million than playing PB.
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Quote: Originally posted by Stack47 on Apr 6, 2013
Some of the terminals were reprogrammed because they issued duplicate sets of numbers and were sold to one player. It's not the same as from a master list, but it does prevent duplications.
"...it does prevent duplications."
Are you saying there are no duplicate QP's given out or just no duplicates on one ticket?
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Quote: Originally posted by Stack47 on Apr 6, 2013
Some of the terminals were reprogrammed because they issued duplicate sets of numbers and were sold to one player. It's not the same as from a master list, but it does prevent duplications.
That was an actual glitch where a number of terminals were printing duplicate tickets. (all 5 QPs the same) It may have continued to occur until someone (in this case multiple people) was denied a prize. (prizes) But someone in a pool got duplicates and alerted them so that the glitch has been fixed.
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Quote: Originally posted by Stack47 on Apr 7, 2013
The annual report on the NY Lottery's website is more concise than most state lotteries so I couldn't find the prize winnings to ticket sales percentage. The total ticket sales of Sweet Million is $39,398,339 and the report says of that $20,104,231 went to Educational Aid. Some of the remaining $19 million probably goes to expenses so I'm guessing about 45% of the total sales is paid out in prizes.
The overall chances of winning $1 million is much better playing Sweet million than playing PB.
Thank you.
I agree, it's much easier to win one million dollars playing SM than playing PB. 3.8 million to 1 odds to win a million dollars is tough to find in an online one dollar per line game. I've looked at other state's lotteries websites, and I've yet see anything close to it.
The best thing I've seen has been a raffle held by The State of Connecticut. For the last two years, CT has been running a "SuperDraw" raffle twice per year, but it appears as if they wont be doing it this year. Ct was selling a max of 275,000 tickets ($10 each) with a top prize of one million going to one winner. For the July 4th 2012 raffle, tickets did not sell out. Only 262,000 were sold.
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Quote: Originally posted by Stack47 on Apr 6, 2013
"Because if they only sell 56,000 tickets there's only about a 1 in 70 chance of having even a single winner."
The odds you're giving are based on the number of total combinations. I wasn't talking about a single winner, but programing their QP RNG to insure there won't be multiple winners. There is always a risk of several self pick players picking the same five numbers, but at best it's only a small percentage of all ticket sales. If each QP is a unique set of five numbers out of every 3,904,701 tickets they sell, based on their yearly ticket sales, the Rhode Island lottery can expect to have three or four $250,000 prize winners and gamble against multiple self pick winners.
"Do you have some delusion that every single drawing has to have results that perfectly match what probability suggests?"
For the fiscal year 2012, the RI gross MM profits were 34% of their MM ticket sales and if they had to pay five more winners because of QP duplicates, their gross profit would drop to 25%. In one month Kentucky paid out 97% of their total pick-3 ticket sales in prizes, but much worse if they hadn't had a limit on how much could be wagered on one drawing because they reached that limit on three of those drawings.
It's delusional to believe any state lottery would operate as "we'll book any and all bets" and risk having to explain to the state agencies that receive the net lottery revenues and to the state legislators why revenues dropped drastically when total ticket sales were about the same. A loss because of self picks is easy to explain as in KY; the players got lucky. But the same loss because of QP sales could be prevented by programming the terminals QP RNG as I suggested.
I don't know how the terminal RNG for QP are programmed or the drawing RNG, but I doubt we'll ever see Ms. Hargrove being questioned about a drop in net revenues because of a drop in the percentage of gross profits.
"There is always a risk of several self pick players picking the same five numbers, but at best it's only a small percentage of all ticket sales."
That "small percentage" is actually about 20 to 30%, and as I said in my first post, many of those players don't choose their numbers randomly. That means there are more duplicate combiantions from that group than their percentage would suggest. Because birthday numbers account for less than 5% of possible combinations, selling 70 to 80 random QP's should result in only 3 or 4 tickets with those combinations. 20 to 30 self pick tickets would be expected to use 3 or 4 birthday combinations if just 10 to 20% of players use all birthday numbers when making their selections. Players choosing their own numbers very definitely results in far more duplication than would result from purely random selection.
The ultimate example of the lottery having an unusually large number of duplicate combinations is the fortune cookie powerball drawing from several years ago, when there were more than 100 5+0 winners. We can also be sure from tha incident that there were many more players who played other sets of numbers from fortune cookies, so there were probably hundreds of combinations that were played 50 times or more.
Many years ago the NY lottery ran advertisements that said that nearly 10,000 thousands of people played each of the two combinations made by choosing the numbers diagonally from the top left and top right of the bet slip. The lotteries have also reported that large numbers of people play other patterns from the bet slips, consecutive numbers, and multiples of 5.
That makes the chance of an unusually high number of duplicates from randomly selected numbers completely insignificant compared to the risk of letting people choose ther own numbers.
Of course none of that means the lotteries are actually taking a risk. First, everything that results in an increased risk of multiple winners for some combinations is balanced by a reduced chance of having even one winner for other combinations. If drawing all birthday numbers increases the chance of Rhode Islnd having two 5+0 winners out of only 56,000 players, it also reduces thier risk of paying even one prize when the winning combination is from the more than 95% that have a non-birthday number. In the long run, probability ensures that if Rhode Island pays two winners in one drawing it will be balanced by an unusually long run with no winners.
Second, just in case probability doesn't protect them, the official rules will. All lotteries have arule that allows them to make the prizes parimutuel if there are an unusually high number of winners. PB could have exercised that option when they had the fortune cookie payout, but chose to absorb the additional expense. If the winning combination ever is 1,2,3,4,5 or one of the other heavily played combinations you can be sure that the lotteries will exercise that option.
The lotteries have absolutely no need to deliberately reduce duplicates by preventing purely random selection of numbers. On the contrary, a purely random selection reduces their chance of having to reduce individual prizes by making parimutuel payouts.
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Quote: Originally posted by rdgrnr on Apr 7, 2013
"...it does prevent duplications."
Are you saying there are no duplicate QP's given out or just no duplicates on one ticket?
I believe it was 10 duplicate lines. It happened when the jackpot was really high and apparently the player bought over $100 worth of tickets. The lottery gave the odds against that happening, but still reprogrammed to make sure it didn't happen again.
The jackpot prize is divided by all the states so has no effect on individual state payoffs. The secondary prizes are paid by the individual states, some of the states have small ticket sales and duplicate QPs matching five numbers could hurt their bottom line. I'm not suggesting they record all the combos sold and only sell from combos not sold, but it would prevent several duplicate QP lines that could match five numbers.
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Quote: Originally posted by Stack47 on Apr 7, 2013
I believe it was 10 duplicate lines. It happened when the jackpot was really high and apparently the player bought over $100 worth of tickets. The lottery gave the odds against that happening, but still reprogrammed to make sure it didn't happen again.
The jackpot prize is divided by all the states so has no effect on individual state payoffs. The secondary prizes are paid by the individual states, some of the states have small ticket sales and duplicate QPs matching five numbers could hurt their bottom line. I'm not suggesting they record all the combos sold and only sell from combos not sold, but it would prevent several duplicate QP lines that could match five numbers.
Pay out on duplicate lines will not happen if the duplicates are produced by a terminal malfunction like the ones in AZ that were discovered by a pool. Only "valid" duplicate lines will be paid. That's why the cookie fortune incident was investigated to ensure "valid" duplicates were being paid.
Cindy bought the couple's winning combination, along with four others, the night of the drawing at Trex Mart, 17605 Highway Z in Dearborn. She let the computer quick pick the combinations on her ticket. The winning numbers were: 5, 16, 22, 23, 29, and the Powerball was 6.
"Do everything you can. Then, leave the rest to luck."
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Quote: Originally posted by Original Bey on Apr 8, 2013
Cindy bought the couple's winning combination, along with four others, the night of the drawing at Trex Mart, 17605 Highway Z in Dearborn. She let the computer quick pick the combinations on her ticket. The winning numbers were: 5, 16, 22, 23, 29, and the Powerball was 6.
There it is then, they can and do give out duplicate Quick Picks.