Not so lucky

Every now and again the evening press manages to surprise me. Generally it is not in a positive way. Like this Saturday one of the major evening newspapers had this message:



For those of you that are not familiar with the Swedish language it says, loosely translated, “The 'lucky shops' that hand out big prizes in Uppsala”.

I know that the point of printing newspapers is to get people to read them, but either the journalists responsible think that their readers are idiots that deserve to be misinformed about how games of chance works or they are themselves misinformed and thus present us with the question how they managed to become journalists to begin with.

The fact is of course that a random event has no recollection of what has happened before. Even if you flip heads 10 times in a row the odds that you will get another head the next time is still 50%. There cannot be any such thing as a lucky shop when it comes to the games of chance.
I am willing to make an exception for betting games there some skill is involved. It is possible that people betting at one particular shop have more knowledge of horses or football teams, and that can give the shop an advantage.

Now I know I should not critique something I have not read, and I did not read the article in Expressen. It is perhaps unfair of me to assume that they don't explain the gambler's fallacy in the article, but I will assume that they also forgot to normalise their figures.
If one shop sells 10.000 lottery tickets and another shop sell 1.000 it is not surprising if the shop selling the larger number of tickets also have a larger number of big wins. I am almost ready to bet that the reporter forgot to do this simple thing.

I would hope that newspapers like Expressen, that are read by a lot of people, do not rely on luck when they write their news, but if they do they were not so lucky this time.