My Luck In The Toto Hong Bao Draw

Caution: This post is rated NC18. It contains discussion on gambling gaming.

Warning to my 2 sons: You stay away, okay?. (Studies have shown that parents who are avid gamblers gamers are likely to have children who take after them. Wanna bet?)

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Many people buy 4D, Toto and Big Sweep for a hope. As they would say in typical Singlish, "Don't buy, no hope. Got buy, got hope. No win, neber mind. I do charity lor." (According to the Singapore Pools' website, its surpluses are "channelled toward funding worthy causes and projects through the Singapore Totalisator Board".)

I seldom buy Toto. Not that my religion forbids it. (I am a freethinker.) Not that I am not greedy for the money either. After all, "something without labour" is always better than Nil Sine Labore ("nothing without labour").

I only buy Toto when the grand prize grows to an astronomical amount and even then, only when I happen to pass buy a Toto outlet with no queue and all the stars are aligned in my favour.

Alright, enough excuses for being greedy. I finally succumbed and bought myself a $10 Prosperity Pack today. (Included in the pack are 2 boards of "Quick Pick System 7" and a "Singapore Sweep" ticket.)


When the results were published, I could not believe that I struck the Group 1 prize didn't even strike a single number out of the 14 numbers I wagered on:


Now could someone good in maths please tell me what were the odds for that happening? If chance was very slim, they ought to award me a prize as well, don't they? After all, if I had picked 38 numbers and didn't strike any of them, the chance would have been the same as correctly picking all 7 numbers that came out in the draw, am I right? (38 + 7 = 45, the total number of balls in the game.)

Frankly, I don't understand why people are so excited about the yearly Hong Bao Toto draws with big prizes. Consider this - the previous "non-Hong Bao" draw had only ONE Group 1 winner who won all of $1,592,705 while this Hong Bao draw had a total of 14 Group 1 winners sharing a prize of about $10 million. Each winner took home only about $732,000, less than half the amount which the previous Group 1 winner won. It doesn't make sense, does it?

In any case, now I feel like a really sore loser charitable person. As they say, it's time to move on and I am looking forward to striking $2.2 million 1st prize in the Singapore Sweep draw on 4 Mar 09.