Powerball's second prize goes to a ticket that matches all five main numbers and misses the Powerball. On an ordinary draw a handful of people manage it. On 30 March 2005, when the numbers came up 22, 28, 32, 33 and 39, one hundred and ten did.
That is not a lucky night. That is an alarm.
The operator's own estimate for the number of second-prize winners on a draw like that was in single figures. A hundred and ten meant something systematic: a compromised draw, a printing fault, a syndicate, a fraud. Powerball's security staff began an investigation across twenty-nine states, and the first question they asked the winners was the obvious one. Where did you get the numbers?
The answer, over and over, was a biscuit.
The Cookie
Powerball in March 2005 drew 5 from 53. Matching all five without the Powerball paid $100,000. How many people held that one line?
Chance the draw matches it: 1 in 2,869,685 — the same for one holder as for three hundred. If it comes up, the operator writes cheques for $11,000,000.
110 is the documented figure. The operator went looking for a fraud; what it found was a fortune cookie printed in very large numbers, whose sixth value did not match the Powerball — which is the only reason this was a second prize and not a jackpot.
The numbers had been printed on the slips inside fortune cookies — the small paper strips that carry an aphorism on one side and a row of "lucky numbers" on the other. They were made by Wonton Food Inc. of Long Island City in Queens, a firm that supplies a very large share of the fortune cookies eaten in the United States, and which printed the same set of numbers across an enormous run.
The company was not selecting numbers with any care, and had no reason to: they are decoration. But decoration distributed by the million stops being decoration. Somewhere in the order of a hundred and ten people had eaten a cookie, kept the slip, taken it to a retailer, and played it — and every one of them held the same line as everyone else who had done the same.
The slip carried six numbers. The sixth was not 42, so not one of the hundred and ten won the jackpot. The second-prize bill came to roughly nineteen million dollars, which the game paid, because nothing improper had happened. Wonton Food's vice-president, asked about it afterwards, observed that the company had never had so much good news to deliver.
The lesson is the same as South Africa's, arrived at from the opposite direction. There, a line that looked like a pattern drew a crowd. Here, a line that looked like nothing at all drew a crowd, because a factory had put it in front of millions of people. In both cases the draw was honest, the probability was ordinary, and the only thing that had been quietly concentrated was the players.
An operator who wants to know its exposure cannot only model the balls. It has to model the biscuits.