A Poor Bastard & His Lottery Ticket...

It seems a day can't slip by that the Grand Poo Ba doesn't open up his web browser only to find one more Poor Bastard Tale of Woe that is worthy of mention...

Today's entry into the annals of The Poor Bastard Tales comes to us from the Grand Poo Ba's native state of Texas, home to the largest indigenous population of Poor Bastards on the planet! Our story concerns a former Garden-Variety Poor Bastard, turned Quintessential Poor Bastard by the name of Willis Willis (no comment).

In a story dated May 31, 2011 the Austin American-Statesman reported that a Garden-Variety Poor Bastard  by the name of Willis Willis, a retired Dallas area maintenance worker, had filed a lawsuit in Travis County, TX against the Texas Lottery Commission, GTech Corp, which runs the lottery, and the owner of a Grand Prairie convenience store where Willis Willis had purchased a winning lottery ticket worth a reported $1,000,000.

The lawsuit alleges that a clerk at the store by the name of Pankaj Joshi, also named in the suit, had kept the ticket after Willis Willis presented it to him to confirm whether or not is was a winner. Joshi then cashed the ticket himself at the lottery commission's headquarters in Austin and immediately fled the country for his native Nepal...(I know...I know).

Willis Willis - the Garden-Variety Poor Bastard who alleges that he was defrauded out of a winning lottery ticket by a Nepalese convenience store clerk named Pankaj Joshi; who fled the U.S. after cashing the winning ticket worth approximately $750,000 after taxes...







Now before we go any further, it seems only appropriate to pass along a few observations about lotteries in general, specifically how they relate to the Garden-Variety Poor Bastard.

Lotteries, for those of you who may be living in a cave, are a state-sponsored gambling enterprise that is used by 43 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands as a revenue generating tool. In effect, a state run lottery is a tax on Poor Bastards who are bad at math....

And apparently there are no small number of Poor Bastards who are just that, because ever since state run lotteries were first legalized sometime back in the 1970's they have grown like a wild-fire in almost every state where they are operated.

The way it works is, millions of Poor Bastards are enticed into purchasing a lottery ticket for a price ranging from 50 cents to $1. Each of the tickets represents one potential winning set of numbers; typically 6 unique numbers out of 44 or more possible selections.

The lure is that if you are the Lucky Poor Bastard  that good fortune is about to visit then you win all of the loot that the other Poor Bastards lose (minus 50% or more that the state keeps to spend how they see fit).

Now, for the uninitiated and those Poor Bastards who have only a grade school understanding of ciphers and basic math, let's review what your actual chances are of being the Lucky Poor Bastard who wins the Big Kahuna on any particular day....

Supposing we have a lottery where you have to select 6 unique numbers from a list that includes the numbers 1 through 49; "unique" in this context meaning that you cannot pick the same number more than once. Known as a 6/49 lotto this is a commonly played game in many states.

So, what do you suppose are the odds of actually picking the 6 correct numbers?

Do you even know how to calculate those odds?


Does it really matter what those odds are?

These are the questions Inquiring Poor Bastards should be asking before they waste their money on this ridiculous game of chance, but as you may have guessed that's not what the overwhelming mass of Poor Bastard  humanity does.....

Oh no, what millions of Poor Bastards do everyday is go out and buy lottery tickets by the fistful, even though their chances of winning the 6/49 lotto are about 1 in 14 million!

And just because you buy a dozen of them at the same time, don't start thinking that will increase your chances of winning 12 times over. The math doesn't work that way!

Because the calculation process is far too complicated for us to go into here, all of you Poor Bastards are just going to have to trust me on this; but rest assured, your chances of winning the lottery are infinitesimally small.....Just as our friend Willis Willis's chances were.....

That's right folks!....Our friend and Fellow Poor Bastard Willis Willis just experienced the success of winning the lottery at odds of 14 million to 1!.....And then he goes and hands his ticket over to some Nepalese convenience store clerk and walks away leaving the clerk with the ticket after he tells Willis Willis that it is no good!....

Now some Poor Bastard's, including this one, might think that Willis Willis would have had just an inkling that his ticket may have been worth something...don't you think?

Otherwise how would he have ever figured out that it was his pilfered ticket the clerk had in fact cashed to the tune of 750 large?

And speaking of Willis Willis, our newly confirmed Quintessential Poor Bastard, it seems that all is not lost...

The Austin Police and Travis County prosecutors have recovered almost $400,000 of the money from a bank account that the alleged thief Pankaj Joshi (pictured at left) was stupid enough to leave in a U.S. bank; even though he had the seemingly good sense to flee the country! For this colossal display of utter stupidity Mr. Joshi has successfully earned himself an honorable mention as a Dumb-F-k Poor Bastard!


Poor Bastards from throughout the Kingdom should keep their fingers crossed that our friend Willis Willis gets his due reward and let's hope the rest of the general population of Poor Bastards is able to learn from Willis Willis's unfortunate experience....