A co-worker, who was also a very good friend of mine, was lucky with scratch-off tickets. He won two very nice sums of money $55,000 and $75,000 from scratch off games, within two years of each other. One day at work I asked him how he did it. As you would suspect, he laughed my question off, and smugly kept his winning formula to himself.
It wasn't but a few weeks later though that something happened and he let the "cat out of the bag". Being that he was a good friend of mine, he cared about me and was genuinely concerned one day when he noticed that I was very distraught. I was having one of those awful days where everything went wrong... from the moment I got out of bed and throughout the entire day. He tried to cheer me up, as a good friend will do, but I was deep in despair. So he said to me "you need to stop and buy some lottery tickets on your way home from work". Totally surprised by this off-the-wall remark, I said "yeah sure, and losing twenty bucks would be a fantastic way to end my awful day!" He looked me in the eyes and said "I'm serious... I won't tell all my secrets but this is a big one that should help you have a good ending to a bad day. Look at it this way... on your good days you've been pretty lucky, right? I mean, things go right you're lucky, things go wrong you're unlucky. So you don't want to buy those lottery tickets on those days that everything has gone right because you've probably used up most, if not all, of your good luck. You want to buy lottery tickets on those days where everything has gone wrong because you haven't used up your good luck for the day."
I thought about what he said, and though it seemed like backward advice, there also seemed to be some logic in what he told me. So on my way home from work I stopped and bought five $2 scratch-off tickets, still not wanting to risk losing more than $10. To my surprise I actually won some money! No it wasn't a life changing amount, just $100, but it still did exactly what he said it would and that was to bring a happy ending to an awful day!
The next day at work I told him what I had done and won, and thanked him for his advice. He remarked that I had done the right thing by buying no less than five tickets. He went on to say "the biggest mistake that most people make when buying lottery scratch offs is that they only buy one or two. Most $2 lottery scratch off games have odds around 1:4.7 so if you buy five tickets you are almost guaranteed to win something. You figured out another part of my lottery system all by yourself... always even the odds if you can afford to do so".
To this day I still stop and buy scratch off lottery tickets when I'm having a terrible day and do you know... those days I always come home a winner. Funny how lucky days work, huh?
