Deborah Mathis - Unlucky Number: The Murder of Lottery Winner Abraham Shakespeare

In March 2014, on the brink of the annual college-basketball showdown known as March Madness, billionaire Warren Buffett teamed with Quicken Loans to concoct a get-rich-quick scheme to beat all. They would pay $1 billion to anyone, eighteen or older, who correctly predicted the winners of every game in the sixty-three-game national tournament. Even with the number of contestants limited (one per household) to fifteen million entries, the odds of winning were a mind-numbing one in nine quintillion. But that didnt stop people from trying. (Unsurprisingly, no one won Buffetts bracket contest. No one even came close. Most people were eliminated on day one; no one remained by the end of day two.)

Although Buffetts March Madness bracket scheme was not a lottery per se, like a lottery, it was a game of chance and showed, once again, that the dream of striking it suddenly and gloriously rich is alive and well. Not even absurd, nearly impossible odds can quell it.

Lotteries have been a part of the United States since its very founding, when tickets to games of chance were sold to help fund the development of some colonies (such as Jamestown, Virginia), and at one point were considered not only a viable way to raise revenue for public causes, but a civically responsible one. At one time, all thirteen original colonies had a lottery to raise revenue for public services. But, in time, the lotteries became riddled with bribery, payout defaults, and other corruption. They fell into such disrepute that evangelical reformers were able to successfully press a moral argument for prohibition, and by 1895, government-run lotteries were banned nationwide.

The lotterys official comeback took nearly three quarters of a century, beginning in New Hampshire in 1964. Today, armed with regulations and safeguards, forty-four states, plus the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands, all sponsor lotteries. Only Alabama, Alaska, Hawaii, Mississippi, Nevada, and Utah abstain.

Both religious and public policy advocates routinely oppose lotteries (the former usually due to biblical strictures, and the latter typically out of concern over the governments reliance on fantasy-fueled games of chance to fund essential services like public education), but state and multistate lotteries are wildly popular among the masses. It is estimated that about 120 million American men and womenhalf of all adults in the countryplay state-run lotteries each year, accounting for $45 billion in receipts. Only about 1,600 of them will win a million dollars or more. The rest of us have to settle for a few bucks, if were at all lucky, or more likely just add the useless slips to our pile of poor choices. The summer house in the Hamptons, the ski chalet in Saint Moritz, the foundation we were going to endow, the freedom from indebtedness, and the ability to tell the boss to take this job and shove itall will have to live a bit longer in our fantasies and most likely will live there forever. But hope springs eternal that Fortune will make a rewarding pit stop our way. Indeed, the randomness of a lucky strike is part of the lotterys appeal. It can happen to anyone, from any walk of life, and in even the most obscure places.