National Lottery operator Camelot announces record ticket sales of £5.8bn in the year to the end of March.

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Camelot posts record annual sales

Kettle’s Yard, Cardigan Castle and the Royal Crescent in Bath are to get a share of £10m from the Lottery Heritage Fund, it is announced.

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Heritage sites get funding boost

Four “very different” community projects across Scotland share more than £1.7m in grants from the Big Lottery Fund.

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Four groups celebrate £1.7m award

National Lottery operator Camelot is refused permission to allow consumers to use its terminals to pay bills or top up mobile phones.

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Lottery bill-paying move blocked

This is really cool–and fascinating, too. A few days ago, riffing on this Wired story about Mohan Srivastave, a geological statistician in Toronto who figured out how to beat scratch-off lotto tickets, I wrote about my history as a callous, collegiate liquor store clerk and my own much more rudimentary system for beating lotto. Well, apparently I am not the only liquor store clerk to employ this system, which, when I think about it, is not really shocking. Mohan Srivastave himself read my item and dropped me a note to let me know that liquor store clerks–or lottery retailers, a slightly broader category, I’d imagine–actually win a disproportionate share of scratch-off lotto tickets. He was kind enough to let me share his email and data: You’re right that the number of winners per packet is a design specification of most of the provincial and state lotteries. They don’t want to let this be truly random because then there would be some packets that had very few winners, and this would leave some retailers feeling like they’d been given crappy packets. As humans, we tend to have poor instincts for what is truly random, and therefore are not good judges of when we’re lucky and when we’re unlucky. So camping out, waiting for someone else’s losing streak, is a good strategy. And it’s one that can only be employed by lottery retailers … … which goes a LONG way to explaining the documented anomaly that lottery retailers win an amazing percentage of the $$ in instant scratch games. Here in Ontario, analysis of recent data suggests that about 1 in 10 of the instant scratch prizes is claimed by lottery retailers. There are about 11,000 – 12,000 retail outlets in Ontario, so maybe 40,000 – 50,000 people who would count as employees of lottery retail outlets. And that’s waaaay less than one tenth of the lottery-playing public in Ontario. So people have struggled to find an explanation. The lottery corporation has settled on the observation that employees in retail outlets probably tend to play more than the average shmo on the street. But your strategy sounds like a much more plausible explanation. Even without doing any kind of formal analysis of winning/losing patterns, a lot of retailers will have started to realize that long losing runs are often capped by a better-then-average winnings.

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Why Liquor Store Clerks Often Win Lotto

A lucky band of ground zero construction workers scored a $250,000 prize in a Christmas Eve Mega Millions lottery drawing, picking five of six numbers correctly, the New York Lottery says.

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Ground zero workers win $250K lottery

For the commoners not lucky enough to score one of 100 tickets to Prince William’s wedding through the lottery, British broadcasters might offer the next best thing. Sky, the BBC, and Virgin are considering showing the nuptials in 3-D, live from…

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Royal Nuptials Could be Shown in 3-D

A survey for the BBC suggests that most people believe they would be happier if they won the lottery.

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What makes British people happy?

A survey for the BBC suggests that most people believe they would be happier if they won the lottery.

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What makes British people happy?

A 15-year project to restore York Minster’s East Front secures £9.7m of heritage Lottery Fund grant aid.

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Minster gets £9.7m funding boost

An artistic twosome realizes dream desires from forgotten scratch-offs Curious about how people spend their winnings after hitting it big with the lottery, collaborative artists Lauren Was and Adam Eckstrom channeled their research into astounding representational sculptures of dream desires like a Hummer, a yacht and a large home using scratch-off lottery tickets. Working under the moniker

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The Art of Discarded Lottery Tickets