Playing the odds and winning big

I guess it is possible. Sisters and brothers can get along, assuming

they’re not teenagers.

One thing that should keep the arguments with your sibling to a

minimum is splitting a million dollars. Kelly Haggard can tell you

how that works.

Haggard, a 34-year old Costa Mesa resident who won a million bucks

on a $5 Scratcher ticket she bought at the Vons on 17th Street, plans

to split the loot with her older brother, Jim.

“We talked about this years ago,” Haggard told the Pilot. “If one

of us ever won, we would split it up.”

Haggard said that she and Jim were very close growing up and that

he would often take her to Angels games.

Are you paying attention here, men? Nobody wants to take his kid

sister to a ball game, but just do it. It’s important.

Splitting the money with her brother is no idle boast for Kelly,

who dutifully posed in front of Vons on Wednesday with a giant check

for $1 million payable to Jim and Kelly Haggard. After Vons gets its

$5,000 cut and Uncle Sam and the state get done rooting around in

Kelly’s million-dollar haul, she will be left with $750,001.25, which

ain’t bad.

Once they split the $750,000, I suspect her brother will tell her

to just keep the $1.25.

It’s hard to tell exactly how much excitement this will cause in

the Haggard family though. According to California lottery officials,

Kelly’s father, Bill, won $50,000 on a Scratcher ticket some time

ago, and her mother, Doris, has won four times on other lottery

games. All of which means, if you know any of the Haggards and they

want to go to an Angels game -- take them, especially Kelly.

We’ve all had our fantasies of hitting the lottery and what we’d

do with the money, etc, etc. I know what you’re thinking. What are

the odds? In two words: not good.

In most states, you need to pick six numbers from a set of 50,

give or take a few, to win that week’s big jackpot. The chances of

picking six numbers from a set of 50 are about 16 million to one.

The game Kelly was playing -- the Next Millionaire -- has much

better odds. According to the California Lottery website, Kelly’s

chances of being an instant $1-million winner were 1.2 million to

one. See? Much better.

When you hear about jackpots of hundreds of millions of dollars,

that’s usually a multi-state lottery like Powerball, or in our case,

Mega Millions, which puts California players in a pool with 11 other

states. The current Mega Millions jackpot is about $65 million, but

make sure you’re feeling really, really lucky because the odds of

winning are 176 million to one.

How do those odds stack up against other once-in-a-lifetime

events?

In two words: not good.

Compare that 176-million-to-one chance of winning to the odds of

being struck by lightening, according to the National Safety Council,

in a given year: 4.5 million to one.

How about the odds of dying different ways? That’s always a

pick-me-up. The safety council says the odds of dying in a car

accident in your lifetime are 228 to one -- or 869 to one in a

pick-up truck. Your odds of dying in a plane crash are 5,704 to one;

drowning, 9,019 to one; and falling, 229 to one.

Yikes. Watch your step.

Actually, some of the categories of how people die are more

interesting than the odds: riding an animal-drawn vehicle, 31,568 to

one; nightwear catching fire, 286,537 to one; legal intervention

involving firearm discharge -- which I assume requires at least one

policeman and one person doing something really dumb -- 12,417 to

one. And my personal favorite: bitten or struck by other mammal,

49,666 to one.

Let’s review. I have a one-in-286,537 chance of death by

spontaneous pajama combustion, and a one-in-49,666 chance of being

beaten to death by an orangutan, but only a one-in-1.2-million chance

of winning the Next Millionaire? Maybe I’ll pass.

Even though she beat those unconscionably high odds, Kelly Haggard

is not letting it go to her head. The only thing she’s bought so far

are 10 tickets for an upcoming San Diego Chargers-Miami Dolphins

game. Kelly plans to use the rest of her money to pay off her student

loans and find some new digs.

That’s much different than the stories of people who have won

staggering amounts of money in lotteries only to blow it all within a

few years or, in some cases, a few months. But there is one lottery

story that is a little more interesting than most.

According to the San Leandro Times, 19-year old Troy Dennis Jr.

also scored a winning Scratcher ticket at a 7-Eleven store just

outside San Leandro on Aug. 19. He didn’t exactly pay for it, though,

because he and two other men were in the process of robbing the store

at gunpoint when they ran off with some cash and a batch of lottery

tickets. Imagine Troy’s excitement when he scratched his way to a

$500 prize with one of the stolen tickets.

Now, most people would realize that lottery tickets are carefully

tracked and that stolen tickets are easily traceable. Troy Dennis was

not one of those people.

He called the number on the “winning” ticket, showed up right on

time for his appointment at the lottery office with his grandmother,

who was not involved in any way, and was cuffed and in the back of a

squad car in record time. For the perfect ending to the perfect

crime, when Dennis showed up at the lottery office, he was wearing

exactly the same clothes he wore during the robbery, which was caught

on tape.

So that old saying is true: You have a better chance of being

beaten to death by an orangutan than collecting on a stolen Scratcher

ticket in San Leandro. Like you didn’t know that.

I gotta go.

* PETER BUFFA is a former Costa Mesa mayor. His column runs

Sundays. He may be reached by e-mail at [email protected].