Thursday 13 December 2012

Lottery history


Lottery authors like to imply a long and distinguished history of lottery play. Often cited is a keno-like game played by the ancient Chinese. The casting of lots (bones or dice) by Roman soldiers and door prizes given out by Roman emperors.
During the age of exploration, commercial ventures and governments often raised capital by conducting a raffle. Again not a lottery. The Dutch were the first to try an all cash prize lottery to raise money to free impressed Dutch sailors. In Spain the first national lottery was established by King Carlos III in 1763.
In the nineteenth century large raffles of various types became the rage. Unfortunately the lack of any properly constituted overseeing legal authority allowed the games to become corrupted thus giving rise to demands the games be cleaned up and regulated. Instead they were banned.
During the late 1940's many rural towns across the U.S. held cash lotteries every Saturday to bring in people from the countryside to stimulate local business. .
It wasn't until the latter half of the twentieth century true lottery games came into being. The modern lottery game not only provides the security of government held or regulated random drawings. The players are allowed to make their own luck by selecting their own numbers thus reducing the incentive value of cheating by allowing for multiple jackpot winners.
As we progress into the twenty-first century many lottery games are moving from air blown or ball drop drawings to drawings held within a computer. In this author's opinion, this is a disaster waiting to happen which may impugn the integrity of the games. The opportunity to piggy back hidden code into these software programs may be too much for some computer programmers to ignore.
Current examples of computer horror stories include the Tennessee lottery locking certain potentially winning numbers out from being drawn (albeit accidentally) give credibility to the charge computer drawings can be manipulated.
The future of lottery is somewhat in doubt as states demand ever increasing revenue be received from games that should be returning more in prizes to the players in the face of competition by casinos and internet gambling opportunities.
Another potential problem is the sale of state lottery games to private companies under the bizarre theory the companies will provide better prizes and services than the state and still be able to recover the billions paid for the lottery franchise and show a hefty profit for their shareholders.
Laws need to be changed to allow competition between lottery games. Allow people to buy lottery tickets online for any state game. Let the people chase the jackpot if that's their desire, or let them select the game with the best ratio of odds vs prize. It's their money, let them decide how and where to spend it.
The game prizes need to be made tax free by including the tax in the selling price of the tickets.
Jackpot winners should be allowed to keep their identity secret so families aren't disrupted by having to immediately relocate once their new wealth is announced.

No comments:

Post a Comment