I used to work with a guy who repaired the bingo machines at one point in his career. I told him I loved bingo and asked if the bingo balls were somehow rigged as I felt that at one parlor the G’s came up way too often. Like all the G’s would be called before even 5 of the B’s. I said it was frustrating because it made it impossible, to hit the number to win by in a progressive. Say the progressive is won when you hit in 52 numbers, well if most of the numbers are the G’s and you barely have any B’s, you’re not going to make that target.
I expected him to laugh at me and say “no way”. But instead he said, “oh heck yeah!” If you make the balls lighter, they will come up more often. But that’s not really an effective way to cheat the way that the cards are, even knowing what numbers come up the most, it’s not like you can just pick the cards you want. Then you’d have to study them and the patterns to be sure that those numbers are in those patterns for each game. Unless you had an in with someone who worked at the hall, maybe. Even then? Probably not worth the effort.
I read about a person who was a bingo technician and found a way to get himself free cards on the machines, so he had an advantage of having more cards. Then I got to thinking well, what if someone saved all their old cards? Not that they could play them, no, but if they had a device that tracked those cards and whether they won or not. Then they’d have possibly hundreds of cards for one game that they didn’t pay for. But then they’d be pretty obvious carrying around a large file cabinet with a stack of cards, then when they had a bingo, they’d have to dig through and find the right card. I believe most places track serial numbers on the cards, so they’d have to match that as well. Yeah not a great way to cheat.
Which then got me to thinking about other games that use ping pong like balls. Like say the lottery? Keno? If someone can make a bingo ball lighter, then inherently, with wear and tear, some of those balls are going to be different in weight. I began to delve into madness analyzing how often the keno balls came up at different casinos. Not just that, but whether or not the top 6 came up enough to play those numbers and eventually win big. The experiment showed, had I decided to pay say $8,664, I would have won $3,683(current mega jackpot) for one 6 out of 6 hit (odds are 7,752-to-1). But strangely if I picked the bottom, least called numbers, I hit 6 out of 6 3 times in that same time frame at one Vegas casino, for the rest, didn’t matter, top or bottom, only 1 time did I hit 6 out of 6. But I hit 6 out of 6. I also hit 7 out of 7 at one casino which would have paid around 17K, so I would have made my money back at the one casino but not the others.
Still too random for me to take out a home equity loan and throw caution to the wind. But it does make it more interesting to play along and continue to analyze the possibilities. However, after analyzing top or bottom or more recent, like say the top 6 of the last 500 numbers called, I did find that overall, I won more money using the top numbers vs. the bottom numbers. Not enough at all to make up for the amount spent. Still a loss. But next time I go to Vegas, I’ll play the top numbers. It’s still fun to try. Also here is a great link for the Colorado Lottery that shows the top and bottom numbers. In case you want to test my theory. Although I understand that they have 3 different sets of balls they use for the Powerball and they are pretty heavily inspected for wear and tear.
https://www.coloradolottery.com/en/player-tools/hot-numbers/