I knew those scratch games were rigged....Happy Drawings.....

Another great story from the folks at Wired.com....Happy drawings.....

How to Pick a Winner

The first lottery Mohan Srivastava decoded was a tic-tac-toe game run by the Ontario Lottery in 2003. He was able to identify winning tickets with 90 percent accuracy. Here’s how it works.—J.L.

1

Look over the card. You’ll be hunting for so-called singletons—numbers on the visible tic-tac-toe grid that appear only once on the whole card.

2

Make a plot of the card, marking each cell with a number that indicates how many times the numeral in the cell occurs on the whole card. If, for example, a cell has a 26 in it and the number 26 occurs one other time somewhere on the card, mark that cell with a 2.

3

All the singletons will now be marked with a 1. If any of the singletons appear in a tic-tac-toethen the ticket is almost certainly a winner: The numbers in these cells will appear under the latex coating at the left side of the ticket. Keep the ticket.

4

Scratch off the latex. You’ve got a winner! Not surprisingly, after Srivastava alerted the Ontario Lottery to his technique, the game was pulled from stores.

The official explanation from the Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corporation is that the tic-tac-toe game suffered from a “design flaw.” According to Tony Bitonti, a senior manager of media relations at the Ontario Lottery, the printer of the game, Pollard Banknote, provided “written assurances” that “none of the other instant games it printed were impacted by this.” As a result, the Ontario Lottery continued to sell scratch tickets with baited hooks. The story of the broken game got little public attention. It was, however, cited in a 2007 investigative reportby the Ontario ombudsman, who was investigating retailer fraud.