It winds me up to see the world’s mathematicians, statisticians and essentially, this collective alliance of over-sensible, fuddy-duddy, pessimistic dullards, getting together with their pompous senses of reason, facts, figures and numbers, and deriding the lottery.

It may not come as a shock that I am a regular Saturday night participant of Lotto.

Every so often these overeducated boffins seem to sit down with their pen and paper then do their best to abolish any shred of excitement Lotto might bring to the hearts of the hopeful, by making the likelihood of winning anything substantial sound so hopeless, so farcical, so downright implausible and outright impossible that well, you might as well just go off and shoot yourself right now.

That ridicule stops here…

Whenever I see or hear one of these so called statisticians quoting their apparently unimpeachable equations – which I guarantee no one has even cared to check through before broadcasting because who really cares that much? – I briefly flick through the sums being thrown around and yes, of course they add up but, like any good manipulators these people doing the sums have cleverly arranged the facts to best emphasise their points while dismissing any others and ultimately, they give the conclusions they want you to hear.

…In New Zealand anyway, the odds of winning enough to at least cover the cost of your ticket are very good – but that’s not why people play Lotto, hell no, we all want to win the big one, the prize that will immediately elevate us to a far greater status than we could ever have imagined – while the chances of winning that elusive top prize, in a country as sparsely populated as New Zealand, in those weeks where on a Sunday morning it is revealed on paper or TV that somebody has in fact won the first division, in contrast to a nation such as the US and their national draw where you’re one person amid approximately 150 million so what are the chances, in good ol’ NZ you know there’s only around 1 million other lottery contenders you need to defeat in order to take that top prize…

I don’t think though, realistically I mean, anybody actually expects to win Lotto; it’s just something we do for a bit of fun, a little extra joy in the weekend, a small excitement to make up for the fact that although Saturday night was shit and now we really have nothing to look forward to all week, hey, ‘Maybe I won Lotto’.

…That is the optimists approach, unequivocally the gamblers way of perceiving the game: the odds aren’t that bad because it’s a pretty small field. Anyone can waste their time working out the equations, looking at the figures, the facts of probability and so forth, and they can try to tell you that the odds of winning first division are something ridiculous like 1:1 billion but hear this – what were the odds of me, one week over ten years ago, nailing five of the first six numbers on one line, along with the Powerball, to win third division Powerball; then the following week hitting five more numbers on a line to win third division again? …

If the likelihood of winning first division is so slim it’s scarcely worth a mention, second division must possess half that quota of un-likeliness thus third div, half again – still sounds inordinately unlikely to me – then add Powerball to that achievement and again, according to our numbers boffins there is practically zero chance; yet that’s just what I did – in consecutive weeks and yes, once with the Powerball.

…This is the bullshit of statistics and probability; yes probability is likelihood, but life doesn’t always follow likelihood and on the weekend that it doesn’t, I sure as hell want to have bought my Lotto ticket.

That said, those idiots who on winning a large prize suddenly realise that after all this time they actually have no need for the money after all and would just feel so much better if it instead went to some needy charity to help put food in the mouths of impoverished children, or to perhaps help with research to cure the sick or to invest in raincoats to keep dry the wet or something, are indeed idiots: nothing against impoverished children, illness, or staying dry, it’s just that, well, to these people, what the hell do you think you’ve been doing for the past however many years – where do you think your tens of thousands of dollars of lost lottery entries have gone? The New Zealand Lottery Foundation is primarily a charity, thus anybody who decides to award their hard-earned lottery winnings to charity is, in a word, idiotic.

Crap. The above paragraph was an afterthought; I really wanted to close on the one above it but then went and had a bitch about philanthropy, goodwill and all that heart-warming stuff – what would you say are the odds that I could make a copy of the aforementioned excerpt and stick it down there before

This is the bullshit of statistics and probability; yes probability is likelihood, but life doesn’t always follow likelihood and on the weekend that it doesn’t, I sure as hell want to have bought my Lotto ticket.

Also, those who avoid a terrible mishap then on the recommendation of their buddies (Dude, that was so lucky – you should buy a Lotto ticket) go off and buy a Lotto ticket are additional idiots; you’ve already used your quote of luck, why would you expect more?

This is the bullshit of statistics and probability; yes probability is likelihood, but life doesn’t always follow likelihood and on the weekend that it doesn’t, I sure as hell want to have bought my Lotto ticket.

Article by Tim Walker

Edited by Prue Bibble Lutti

Photography by Taika Chance