Luck

Writing about odds below reminded me of a story.

Not to long after I moved to Austin, I took a trip back to Dallas with my roommate Sam, and our friend David. We stopped at a dinky little gas station somewhere between Austin and Waco to fill up and get some snacks. We also bought three scratch-off tickets and agreed to split anything we won. Sitting in my car in the parking lot, we scratched all three and discovered that we had won $1. We went back inside the gas station to redeem our dollar, and then used it to buy another ticket. This time, we won $2. We redeemed the $2 and bought one of the fancy $2 tickets. We won $10. We redeemed that and then bought another $2 ticket. That time we won $80 and decided not to press our luck any further.

To three poor college students living on ramen in ghetto student apartments, this was a fortune. We spent the rest of the trip discussing what to do with the money. About $20 went to cover our gas costs. We blew the rest of the money taking ourselves out to a nice dinner in Dallas. We probably would have done better to split it up and pay some of our expenses, but that wouldn't have been any fun.