Mohan Srivastava is the statistician who cracked the OLG's scratch lottery game. The first lottery Mohan Srivastava decoded was a tic-tac-toe game run by the Ontario Lottery in 2003. He was able to identify winning tickets with 90 percent accuracy. Here’s how it works.
1. Look over the card. You’ll be hunting for so-called singletons—numbers on the visible tic-tac-toe grid that appear only once on the whole card.
2. Make a plot of the card, marking each cell with a number that indicates how many times the numeral in the cell occurs on the whole card. If, for example, a cell has a 26 in it and the number 26 occurs one other time somewhere on the card, mark that cell with a 2.3. All the singletons will now be marked with a 1. If any of the singletons appear in a tic-tac-toe then the ticket is almost certainly a winner: The numbers in these cells will appear under the latex coating at the left side of the ticket. Keep the ticket.
4. Scratch off the latex. You’ve got a winner! Not surprisingly, after Srivastava alerted the Ontario Lottery to his technique, the game was pulled from stores.
