Since 1964, the lottery has been the biggest and most prominent form of legal gambling in the United States. And it is impossible to miss. Winners of Powerball, Lotto, Mega Millions and other lotteries typically go public as a condition of getting paid. They celebrate with oversized checks, express caviar dreams and become multimillionaires overnight.
The payouts can be the very stuff of dreams. On 11 occasions, the grand prize has exceeded $1 billion. On November 7, 2022, Edwin Castro of Altadena, California won the largest lottery jackpot in American history, $2.04 billion. (His lump-sum payout was $997 million.) He treated his friends to a Fiji vacation, and invested in some pricey California real estate, including a $47 million mansion in Bel Air.
But the payouts are incredible longshots. Powerball has odds of roughly one in 292 million, Mega Millions one in 302.6 million. The only consistent winners are the 48 U.S. jurisdictions doing the selling, to the tune of some $100 billion annual ticket sales, paying out only around $64 billion. Percentage wise, that’s a paltry 64 percent. Consider that slot machines in Las Vegas routinely cough up more than 90 percent of the dollars wagered. Even the most sucker-attracting games in the casino are better for players. One of the worst bets you can make at the craps table, wagering on any seven, for example, pays off some 83 percent of the time.
“Nearly all state lottery offerings have house edges so high that those games would be illegal in local casinos,” says one professional gambler who’s figured out how to game certain iterations of the lottery. Not surprisingly, he won’t say how he did it or have his name attached to such exploits.
At its core, the lottery is no damned good. At least, for most of us. Clearly, however, Joan R. Ginther is not like most of us.
هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة July/August 2024 من Cigar Aficionado.
ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 9,000 مجلة وصحيفة.
بالفعل مشترك ? تسجيل الدخول
هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة July/August 2024 من Cigar Aficionado.
ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 9,000 مجلة وصحيفة.
بالفعل مشترك? تسجيل الدخول
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Dean Poll, the owner of Gallaghers Steakhouse on Manhattan's West 52nd Street, has to think both like a restaurateur and the curator of a museum with an entire wing of art. Only, instead of tending to European oil paintings, Poll oversees images of Old New York. I work here every day. I am thinking about the food and staff, Poll says, sitting in a corner that could be called baseball cove. Over his right shoulder are stills of Lou Gehrig and the Yankees' Murderers' Row manager Miller Huggins. Jack Dempsey is clowning, grappling with a bat also held by Babe Ruth. "To Helen Gallagher, sincerely Babe Ruth," the inscription reads. Poll gestures toward signed caricatures of Tiger Woods, Arnold Palmer and Jack Nicklaus. "So I lose, to a certain extent, the importance of what's on the walls. But the photos are the decor. They lend some hominess to the place. It's the heart and soul of this restaurant. It's not cheap decoration. The only thing missing is the cigar smoke", adds Poll, who fancies a Partagás 8-9-8 It's what this restaurant is for 96 years.
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