WOULD YOU LIKE TO KNOW YOUR LUCK?

Evening Star, Issue 20996, 9 January 1932, Page 13

WOULD YOU LIKE TO KNOW YOUR LUCK?

THE CHANGES !N SWEEPSTAKES What are your chances of winning o- j of the £30,000 prizes in an Irish Hospitals Sweepstake? (asks the ‘Sunday Express’). You may be lucky, but mathematical science says that the chances are. so overwhelmingly against you that if you are a wise man or woman you will forget all about the ticket you have been so carefully guarding, and write off the 10s you paid for it as a bad debt. In cold, harsh figures, if £1,500,000 is distributed in prize , it means, since 25 per cent, of the takings go to charity, and a large sum is taken by expenses, that £2,500,000 has been received for the sale of tickets. Five million tickets will have been sold. In addition two free tickets are allotted to the sellers of every ten. In a lottery offering £1.500,000 in prizes the chance of an individual ticket winning the first prize is one in 5,650,000. As the stake money is divided into 15 units of £IOO,OOO the odds against winning one of the £30,000 prizes are precisely 366,666.6 to 1. If you live for 366,666.6 years, and the conditions remain the same, you may be reasonably certain of winning a first prize in the last year of that period. You may win on the first trial, or you may win the 366,666.6 th time you risk your annual 10s, but if you keep on for 366,666.6 years and ultimately_win you will lose money, for all the time twofifths of your stake has been taken by the Irish hospitals and the cost of running the lottery. . This deduction for costs is the fundamental reason why no one can win money by persistent gambling. If a gambler stays long enough at Monte Carlo he will come away minus the commission he has paid to the owner of tho ‘casino for running the house. Mathematical science can measure luck as accurately as it can do a sum in simple multiplication. Take a game of dice. A single dice has six sides, numbered from 1 to 6. When thrown it may stop with only_ one of the sides up. Supposing a bet is taken that the five will turn up. The odds are five to one against that happening; and if nothing is deducted for commission a player will eventually come out even. If a pair of dice are used, then for each side of one the other may turn up in six different ways. What chances are there of throwing a seven? The combinations may be 6 plus 1, 1 plus 6, 5 plus 2,2 plus 5, 4 plus 3, 3 plus 4. There you I—e1 —e six different ways of throwing seven, spots out of a possibility of thirty-six ways. In a game of cards what are the chances of getting four aces in a hand. In a pack of fifty-two cards there are four aces. The chance of getting the first one is 4in 52. In the remaining fifty-one cards there are three _ aces. The chance of a second ace is 3 in 51. Similarly the change of a third is 2 in 50, and of a fourth 1 m 49. The chance of getting four is the product of all the separate chances—one m 270.725. . , Whether a person risks 10s on an Irish sweepstake ticket or not, he is gambling all the time. His life is gambled every time he walks across the street, but the law of probability is so accurate tl ; ..t an insurance company is quite willing to act as bookmaker against the risk, with a certainty, if it obtains enough clients, tnat it will make a profit. An insurance company is like a bookmaker. It it lias plenty of money to meet contingencies and the luck goes against it, it will pay out. If not, like the insolvent bookmaker, it will welsh. If a ,company has a capital of £I,OOO and issues a premium' for £I,OOO, and if the insured person is killed by a taxicab, the company is at an end by the loss of its totni capital. But if the company has £IOO,OOO capital, and insures 100 people in different places for £I,OOO each, the chances of their all dying at once b '.re the company has had time to build up a reserve are 10U to 1 IMiim" company insures people the chances of the whole 1,000,000 dying at once are 1,000,000 to 1 against, so that if proper premiums are charged the laws of probability remove tho element of gn- ling from its side of tho business. The gambler is tne premium-payer, who has no means ot avoiding a fatal collision with a recklessly driven motor car except by staying j,, bed. Even there the chances are not insignificant that he will come to a violent end.