The lottery is an amoral game where people pay money to try and win prizes that are assigned by chance. It’s an ugly underbelly of human greed and an affront to God, who says “You shall not covet your neighbor’s house, his wife, his servants, his cattle, or his goods” (Exodus 20:17). Gamblers, including lottery players, tend to covet the things that money can buy. They believe that if they win the jackpot, their problems will disappear, but this is one of the world’s many lies. (See Ecclesiastes 5:10)
Lottery revenue is used for a variety of purposes, from paying out prizes to covering state operating costs. The vast majority of lottery revenue is generated by scratch-off games. Those tickets are cheap, and the player base is disproportionately lower-income, less educated, nonwhite, and male.
Scratch-off games are the bread and butter of lottery commissions, but they are also very regressive. The average ticket is worth about a dollar, but the winner receives only about 30 percent of the prize value. The rest goes to commissions, advertising, and other expenses.
A common strategy for winning a lottery is to select numbers that are significant to you or to your family. For example, many people choose their children’s birthdays or ages in order to increase their chances of winning. Harvard statistics professor Mark Glickman advises against this. He recommends that you experiment with different lottery games and look for patterns that can be exploited by mathematical analysis.
