How to Increa$e Your Chances of Winning the Lottery is the worst financial advice I’ve read since skimming the pamphlet given to me by an essential oils sales-lady that told me I could become a part-time entrepreneur on my way to financial freedom if I could just find three friends willing to sell a chemical product that promises to cure cancer as long as you’re willing to lather yourself in it and walk through life emanating the aroma of a sandalwood candle formed out of baby wipes and cat droppings.
Lottery games are already scams, but author Richard Lustig has found a way to scam people who are already being scammed. And I’m not just talking about his crackpot “method.” I mean everything about this book from its design to its writing to its pictures to its testimonials is all a con job of epic proportions. Allow me to demonstrate why you’re better off reading my snarky review than ever even joking about playing the lottery in this episode of Bad Taste Book Club.
1. The “Expert”
You don’t need me to tell you why you shouldn’t play the lottery. Publications like Popular Science and The Wall Street Journal can better illustrate your impossibility of winning than I ever could. But worse than a waste of money, the lottery is an unethical and regressive income source for public education. (Check out this podcast episode of Citations Needed for an in-depth look at a shameful revenue stream that disproportionately hurts poor people of color).
But if you prefer taking the word of charlatan over little things like facts and evidence, let me introduce you to Richard Lustig. As mentioned on the book cover, Lustig was a 7-time “Grand Prize” Lottery Winner before he passed away in 2018. He was regarded as an expert at playing the lottery (despite his mullet) when he began making appearances on networks that are pillars of journalistic integrity such ABC, CNN, Fox Business, and of course, Yahoo! News. All this prestige and attention gave him the bright idea to sell a book on his expertise, How to Increa$e (sic) Your Chances of Winning the Lottery, which is brimming with so much confidence that on just the fifth page Lustig writes “even if you follow these methods I am about to share with you, I make no guarantees or promises that you will win anything.” Truly, this is a man I trust with my money!
I know, I sound like a Nellie Naysayer. I mean this guy won a lottery grand prize 7 times! He must be onto something, right? Well let’s look into those winnings and how the “expert” defines a “Grand Prize.”
When you hear the words Grand Prize, what do you think of? Personally I imagine a big money prize, at least a half million dollars, usually associated Mega Millions or Powerball games. If that is what you also imagine, prepare to be disappointed. Lustig’s first two Grand-Prize wins netted him $10,000 (scratch off) and $13,696.03 (Fantasy 5 Game) in 1993 and 1997 respectively. To be sure, these are not small amounts of money, but they aren’t big-time winners that I imagine when I hear the words Grand Prize (And they look even worse once you learn about Lusitg’s “method” in the next section). So okay, we won’t count those 2 towards his grand prize total, but he’s still a 5-time Grand Prize lottery winner, right? Not so fast.
Lustig’s next 2 Grand Prize winnings in 2000 and 2001 came from Second-Chance Drawings. As he explains it: “Some scratch-ticket games games offer a second-chance drawing. In these games, you may mail in your losing tickets for a chance to win a second-chance drawing… prizes include cash, trips, cars, motorcycles, etc.” (9). Lustig also admits that fewer people enter these drawings because they throw away their losing tickets. So his chances of winning are much higher in these second-chance games than in an actual lottery. What did he win in these drawings? A trip to Hollywood to try out for “Wheel of Fortune” (valued at approx. $4,000) and a trip to Memphis to see Graceland (valued at approx. $5,000). Again, these are nice prizes, but would you call these GRAND PRIZES? I certainly wouldn’t. And all of a sudden Lustig’s 5 lottery grand prize wins look more like 3 wins.
His next 3 wins were all for much bigger money ($842,152.91 in 2002; $73,658.06 in 2008; $98,992.92 in 2010), but even then, only one of them feels like a truly massive amount worthy of the title Grand Prize. And considering that notching all these wins took him AT LEAST 17 years (And he probably played for closer to 30 or 40 years if he played lottery games before and after his big wins), you’ll begin to see why my faith in this supposed expert is so low.
But let’s be fair to this man. 7 wins, no matter the prize, are still 7 wins. So let’s take a look at his method for winning to see what insights can possibly be gained from them.
2. The “Method”
The method is to buy more tickets to give yourself more chances to win. Thanks for reading everybody!
No I’ll go into more detail, but Lustig could have stopped his book with that sentence and nothing of value would have been lost. With scratch-off tickets, for example, Lustig buys $100 worth of tickets for the same game each week. Any small prizes that he wins are used to buy more tickets of that same game. By his logic, he can buy more than $100 worth of tickets while only spending $100 (Even though he still usually loses all of it).
The same logic of buying more tickets to give yourself more chances to win applies to number games (such as powerball). “Let’s say the odds of winning are 1 in 24,000,000. If I buy one ticket, then those are my odds. If I buy ten tickets, then my odds are 1 in 2,400,000. With one hundred tickets, my odds are 1 in 240,000, and so on” (13). This much is obvious, but even if you but 1000 tickets to get your odds down to 1 in 24,000, you still have a better chance of becoming a professional athlete than winning the lottery (See the Popular Science Link above). To get your odds anywhere close to winnable, you would have to spend an exorbitant amount of money each week, and if you had that kind of money you wouldn’t feel the need to play the lottery to begin with.
But that’s not all, check out this claim for Lustig’s method: “If you buy one ticket, your odds are 1 in 24,000,000. Let’s say I lose and buy the same set of numbers for the next drawing, now my odds are 1 in 23,999,999… It’s practically impossible for the same winning numbers to come up again, so every time I buy those numbers, my odds get better and better” (13). It’s practically impossible, but not totally impossible. Your odds will stay exactly the same, because the numbers are chosen at random each drawing. In fact, finance author Zac Bissonnette has stated your odds of winning the lottery are actually BETTER if you pick numbers at random.
Even if the math was correct, the advice is STILL hogwash because it assumes that everyone can afford to play the lottery weekly within their budget. For Lustig, he claims that he plays $100 per week and never misses a drawing. Assuming he only played lottery games within the 17 years that he won prizes (and that is doubtful), he spent AT LEAST $88,400 on tickets. Again, this does not include the years before and after he won grand prizes, and it does not include the small cash winnings he used to continue playing the lottery each week. There is no way to know if Lustig actually got a good return on investment.In fact, he has never publicly stated that he is a Net Winner.
3. The “Book”
Lustig is a fraud. His method is a fraud. So it only makes sense that the BOOK ITSELF is a fraud too.
When it was originally published, this book sold for $40 per copy (As of this writing, it costs $32.17on Amazon). Would you believe it costs that much for a book that’s only 32 pages long? Sorry, I guess that’s a bit hyperbolic. In actuality the book has a whopping 15 pages of written content. Every other page is either a chapter title (yes, he uses an entire page to tell you what chapter you’re reading) or a picture of his shit-eating smirk next to a big check or vacation spot. Lustig is familiar with how much people will spend on the lottery scam, so he probably figured he might as well get himself in on the action too.
The fraudulent nature of this whole endeavor becomes more evident the closer you look. The book’s opening quotes attesting the validity and helpfulness of Lustig’s method include statements from random emailers who have not even used the method themselves. The book’s credits include fake job titles for various Lustig family members so they, too, can get a piece of the pie. There’s even a statement to cover Richard Lustig’s ass on the very last page: “This publication… is sold with the understanding that the author and publisher are not engaged in rendering legal, financial, or other professional advice… The author and publisher specifically disclaim any liability that is incurred from the use or application of the contents of this book.” And this guy is still scamming people from beyond the grave with his preposterously-titled “class,” Lottery Winner University (Warning: there is sound. And not just any sound. It’s the sound of an old fart in a mullet flexing on you because you don’t have a BMW like he does).
If you’ve made it this far into the review, you probably aren’t the type of person to play the lottery anyway. But I still feel the need to expose this huxter because I borrowed his book from my local public library. When librarians tell you that every library worth its salt should have a book that personally offends you, this is the kind of book they are talking about. I’m no financial expert, but please people, don’t spend your money on lottery tickets or this God-awful book. Spend it on an ice cream cone or a video game or anything else that will give you actual pleasure in life. No matter how brief.