It’s big news in England that a bunch of amateur math nerds recently won the lottery. They’re pleased, of course, and rather proud of themselves for being so smart as to figure out an algorithm that turns out to be worth quite a lot, although that is, of course, in some dispute from math professionals and fearful lottery officials. It appears that you have to play the system a long time before you’re likely to hit a payout, if you get one at all and the result wasn’t, as most people imagine it to be, pure luck in the first place.

Here in Canada we prefer sure things to probable things, so we’ve developed a fool-proof system. Be related to the guy checking the tickets.

Lottery ‘insiders’ win big bucks
Odds of Ontario results are astronomical, investigation by CBC program reports
SHANNON KARI

More than two hundred lottery “insiders” have won prizes of $50,000 or more in Ontario since 1999, and more than two-thirds of these wins may have involved the deception of a customer who bought the ticket.

The allegation is made by the CBC program the fifth estate, after an investigation into the number of “insider wins” in the province in the past seven years.

A statistical analysis of the number of insider wins concluded that fewer than 60 insiders, such as ticket retailers or clerks, should have won major prizes during the period that was investigated.

The odds that the 214 insiders who claimed major prizes — $50,000 or more — since 1999 won as a result of pure luck, is one in a trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, said University of Toronto professor Jeffrey Rosenthal, who conducted the analysis.

Now THAT, ladies and gentlemen, is what I call a system.