WHEEL OF CHANCE

Rotorua Morning Post, Volume 1, Issue 150, 17 February 1932, Page 7

WHEEL OF CHANCE

penalty of fame THOSE WHO WIN SWEEPSTAKES AND THE MILLIONS WHO DON'T. FIGURES AT MONTE CARLO. Crises, Cabinets, Kings, credits and the Modern Girl might have been one with Nineveh and Tyre for all the interest they inspired in London during "Sweep Week," says a London correspondent. With a unanimity the nation otherwise displays only for war, peace, girl flyers, or a Tory Cabinet, all England has hung upon the news from Dublin. One in six miilion was the chance — and one man brought it off twice; that is, he drew two horses. This, a mathematical friend tells me, is by far the biggest achievement the law of probability has attained. Fortune, luck, chance— call it what you will, does fantastic things far more often than the average man realises, however. But on the other hand it rarely rises to producing more than | a miilion to one chance. That, I j think, is the odds on certain combinai tions on a roulette wheel, such as the same number turning up thrice running. Yet every table at Monte Carlo produces freaks like this at least once a week. With only two colours on the table 1 — red and hlack — you would think that the chances are almost incalculable against one of them turning up ten or twenty times in succession. But every one of the even chances "throws" a ten about once an hour, and sometimes once every ten minutes. Every session produces its runs of fifteen on the even chances, and though it is rare to go above twentyfive, I have myself seen a run of thirty-five at the Sporting Club de Monte Carlo. Strange Patterns. If you want to study an inscrutable marvel, analyse the figures for a day's run on the roulette wheel. It has — I say it quite seriously — persuaded some men from agnosticism into a belief in a superior intelligence directing the world. Every now and then you hear of some mathematician who has abstracted some sort of law from a long series of roulette spins, hut generally the story is a myth. I have never yet succeeded in tracing such a hook. A London automatic telephone company recently used a roulette wheel for calculating how often its half miilion or so of delicate instruments were likely to go round. For this purpose it employed quite a large staff of these girls, but the results have never been revealed. But even the wheel has rarely come anywhere near .the man who drew two tickets. Allowing always for fortuitous adhesion between his counterfoils, he is justified, both statistically and historically, in claiming the title for the world's luckiest man. It is a noticeable feature of the sweepstake winners that they are becoming shyer each time. Presently only the really hard of skin will be signing his real name on the counterfoil. The reasons for this, of course, are that it costs such a terrihle lot to be a sweepstake winner. A man with a large eircle of feminine friends, in particular, has to distribute a substantial percentage of his gayis in presents if he does not want to appear to be a grasping parvenu. Then there are, of course, the poor within the family circle. Not Pqpular. I know one luckless youth who has won a hundred pounds in the present sweep, and is kicking himself for having signed his full name on the counterfoil. Had he signed as the usual "Lucky Lad" or "Hopeful Harry," he would have saved £30. Another cogent reason for annonymity is that sweepstake winners do not, as a rule, enjoy a large amount of social prestige. If you have to leave the old trade and set up somewhere on a nice hit of land in one of the counties, there is a distinct glassiness about the local smile. What happens to these lucky ones who receive the accolade from General O'Duffy at the Dublin Mansion House four times a year? What do they do - with their money, and where do they go? Has anybody ever heard of a sweepstake winner a year after the event ? Some enterprising newspaper should one day, on the eve of a sweepstake, turn loose its reporters' room, on a grand hunt for the previous year's winners. How is the ex-dustman comporting himself on his new income of £1500 a year? Is the middle-aged suburban couple still as radiant as wheji, a year ago, they appeared side by side in the newspapers, over the caption stating that the wife hought the ticket with money saved from the housekeeping allowance ? It is there that the real human drama of the sweepstake lies, rather than in the unfortunate black cat, the money spider, and the black patch in the clouds which, along with other similar terms of art, constitute the bulk of winner's declarations just after the draw.

The Real Story. Apart from that, the greatest story in the sweepstake is that of the six millions who have drawn nothing and Who return to the comfortable rut, or the jobs they loathe or the houses they hate, aft.er a brief two days' anticipation that all life might open up anew before them. These are the things in which the now unfortunately unfashionable Tchekov dealt — the girl living in a single room, who scrambles out of bed to read the morning paper, and then returns • in disappointment to divide her attention between the new ladder and speculation about whether the wretched Mr. Rohinson will want to dictate as many letters as he did the day before; and the elder ly clerk, finally laying down his evening paper and gazing at the fire, while the departing echoes of many, many things run vaguely through his mind, This is the real story of the big sweepstake, the story of the six millions whom the deity in the drum has