Some People Have All the Luck
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Abstract: We look at the Florida Lottery records of winners of prizes worth $600 or more. Some individuals claimed large numbers of prizes. Were they lucky, or up to something? We distinguish the "plausibly lucky" from the "implausibly lucky" by solving optimization problems that take into account the particular games each gambler won, where plausibility is determined by finding the minimum expenditure so that if every Florida resident spent that much, the chance that any of them would win as often as the gambler did would still be less than one in a million. Dealing with dependent bets relies on the BKR inequality; solving the optimization problem numerically relies on the log-concavity of the regularized Beta function. Subsequent investigation by law enforcement confirmed that the gamblers we identified as "implausibly lucky" were indeed behaving illegally.
Cited in
(9)- A BKR operation for events occurring for disjoint reasons with high probability
- Estimating the frequency distribution of the numbers bet on the California lottery
- Optimal play for multiple lottery wins
- Normalized incomplete beta function: log-concavity in parameters and other properties
- Theory of Aces: High Score by Skill or Luck?
- A winner's mean earnings in lottery and inverse moments of the binomial distribution
- A critical probability for biclique partition of \(G_{n,p}\)
- Algorithm for Detection of Illegal Discounting in North Carolina Education Lottery
- The Luckiest Strategy on Earth? A Better Way to Buy Lottery Scratch-off Tickets
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