Do you feel lucky?
I’m glad to say it’s been quite a while since we’ve had this sort of rubbish from the NZ papers, but it’s still going across the Tasman (the Sydney Morning Herald)
If you’re considering buying a lottery ticket, you’d better make sure it’s from either Gladesville or Cabramatta, which are now officially Sydney’s luckiest suburbs when it comes to winning big.
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NSW Lotteries has released statistics that show the luckiest suburbs across all lotto games in NSW and the ACT, as well as other tips for amateurs hoping to ring their bosses tomorrow morning to say they wouldn’t be coming in to work.
Of course, the ‘luckiest’ suburbs are nothing of the sort: just the ones where the most money is lost on the lotteries. Cabramatta has improved a lot in recent years, but it’s still not the sort of place you’d expect to see called ‘lucky’.
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »
I probably don’t say enough positive things about journalists, so I’ll take this opportunity to mention Nicholas Jones and Julian Lee of the Herald, and Sophie Speer and Rebecca Stevenson of the Fairfax papers. In a brief search, they showed up as people who’d written accurate stories about lottery betting strategies.
And, of course, there is the Herald’s great David Fisher, who has a string of pieces on the impact of lotteries on problem gambling, and how the Lotteries Commission handles this.
10 years ago
“Cabramatta has improved a lot in recent years, but it’s still not the sort of place you’d expect to see called ‘lucky’.”
Perhaps it is lucky when one escapes? :-)
10 years ago