About Gambling, Mathematics
and Sales Gimmicks

"If you have math against you, you are dealing with a powerful adversary"

The revenue of all gambling organisations is based on the fact that, statistically speaking, YOU are the loser.
The so called "Win"-competitions in the media belong to that category.

Quiz and competition are among the most popular means of advertising in the tough struggle for market shares.

For the price of a postage stamp I can partcipate in a lottery and gain the chance to win a trip to Acapulco or a new model compact car, provided I am capable of writing correctly the name of the product or its producer.

Sometimes I will be asked to spell out the product's slogan (sloppily hidden in the brochure) or even to name the city on the Seine, whose picture shows an iron tower which is tapered towards the top.
Agreed, postage stamp and post card are very low stakes for rewards of this kind. So is the quarter you put in a Vegas slot machine - if you win anything to cover your trip at least.
I just wonder who it is really financing all those "giveaway" cars, holidays and household technologies.

The manipulation resides in making the naive potential customer and quiz participant believe that it is the producer who finances them. No way he is! The consumers are paying them with each and every purchase of the product whose sales price has been increased accordingly. I myself simply refuse to participate in the finance of Mr and Mrs Jones' vacations or stereo equipment, even if that makes up only 2 percent of the sales price. After all, I know my winning chances when I join a quiz in the company of 400'000 other participants: a mere 1/400000th!

I may well be part of a diminutive group not participating in any game of chance for money. From a purely mathematical point of view, surely I fare better than somebody who has been playing all life long. A better adviser than mathematics is hard to conceive. Simplified, what statistics say is: "Don't play, because your chance to lose is greater than your chance to win".

So-called systems, allegedly increasing the winning odds are not based on mathematics, but on optimising the gain of the system's supplier.

A non-gambler's attitude towards the "Win"-type competitions can only be to demand from the industry:

Deduct the cost of your quiz from the sales price of your product!

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