[directional]

The rules are available to everyone, but having enough cash to purchase that many lottery tickets certainly isn't. Unfortunately this is yet another system that enables the already rich to get richer on the backs of the poor.

[briandear]

Perhaps if the poor didn’t spend so much on lottery tickets their station might improve? If they know they are playing a losing bet, why keep doing it? And these folks that were winning were hardly hedge-fund managers. If the “poor” wanted to play to win, perhaps they could get everyone on their block to chip in to buy shares just like the old couple did? They could get all of their friends to save what they would have spent in the lottery over the course of the year, put that fund into the “pot” and then win, reinvesting it and repeating the process.

It’s hard to be sympathetic to people that make bad decisions as a habit. For example, if it’s a 1/5,000,000 chance of winning and they still keep playing, that’s on them. The have very little sympathy for losing lottery players. If people choose to spend their money like that, that’s their business, but that doesn’t invite sympathy when it doesn’t work out. It isn’t like they are being defrauded or even cheated. They have access to the same rules of the game and they have access to math just like everyone else.

[directional]

> Perhaps if the poor didn’t spend so much on lottery tickets their station might improve?

I agree, and indeed this is a good argument for prohibiting lotteries. They're a form of predatory gambling that relies largely upon irrationality, addiction, and desperation.

[brandonscott]

Any of the millions of poor people that buy lottery tickets every week could have spent a much smaller initial sum and worked up to the millions. It just would have taken longer.

[directional]

According to the couple quoted in the article, taking advantage of a 'Rolldown' draw required an initial investment of $1,100 (equivalent to around $1,500 now). That's not a sum easily available to those who are poor.