Do you know that Mark Six (六合彩) is one of the few gambling activities which is legal in Hong Kong?
In early 1970s, there was lots of illegal gambling in Hong Kong. Fearing how it would harm the public moral and how it might fund the organized crimes, the British Hong Kong government set up the 多重彩 (which was also called “Mark Six”) as legal gambling, aiming to fight the illegal one.
However, 多重彩 was not very popular because it’s difficult to win. The Hong Kong Lotteries Board thus set up another lottery game with new rules. That new lottery game is the六合彩 we have nowadays.
When playing Mark Six (the one we have today), players will have to guess what numbers (within 1 and 49) will be drawn out from the lottery machine. Seven numbers will be drawn every time, with six being “drawn numbers” and one being “extra number”. And of course the more numbers you guessed correctly, the greater the prize is (though you have to guess at least three drawn numbers correctly to get the participating prize). What makes this exciting is that, if no one wins the 1st or 2nd prizes, the money will be added to the Jackpot for the next game. So if this repeats a few times, the Jackpot will pile up, and the dividend of the 1st prize can be accumulated to over HK$100million!
To ensure the fairness of the game, there will be live broadcast of the number drawing. There will also be two to three people (usually people with high social status, like Justices of the Peace) to witness and supervise the whole process. The game is never “fair” to begin with though, in statistical sense (that expected value thingy). But it’s only “unfair” if you lose, I guess?
Yet you don’t get all the money for the top three prizes. You will only receive about half of the dividend. The rest will either go to the government through lottery duty, charities or the Hong Kong Jockey Club as operation fee.
Still, it doesn’t matter to broke people like me. I mean, half of “a lot”, is still “a lot”, right?
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