By Chris Cosci

Advertisements have made the public a very manipulativegroup of people. Advertisers are always coming up with some new way to distort the truth and make their product look more appealing.

For example, take the new ad campaign for the New York State Lottery. They are currently pushing the exciting news that you can now get two games for a dollar. Yes, until a few weeks ago, a dollar could only buy you one game, which would only give you one chance at winning the multi-million dollar jackpot. And now, you can get two games for a dollar, giving you two chances. Those two chances are slim and none, but that's besides the point.

On the surface, this looks like a great idea. However, those clever advertising agents conveniently left out a couple of important facts which make this extraordinary concept seem quite lame, if not downright insulting.

To start, let's turn back the clocks to a time when the air was a little cleaner, life was simpler, and this innocent world had yet to be exposed to those excruciating phone commercials starring Carrot Top (if you haven't seen these commercials, take a fork and shove it into your eye socket - the sensation is relatively the same).

Think way back to March 3, 1999. This was when the New York State Lottery last changed its format. Do you know how many games you could get for a dollar before March 3, 1999? You guessed it:

FACT ONE: Just two and a half years ago, you were able to buy two games for a dollar.

These current ads make getting two games for a dollar seem like an amazing, brand-new concept. The truth is that they probably saw a huge drop in tickets sales when they cut the number of games you could buy for a dollar from two to one. People outside of New York might be wondering how they advertised this change.

What they also did back in 1999 was reduce the number of numbers to choose from. So, instead of choosing six numbers from a possible fifty-four, you would choose six from only fifty-one numbers. Obviously, the ad campaign then stressed the better odds of winning, and ignored the reduced number of games you could play. But, how big of a difference in odds is this?

To illustrate the odds, let's use the often-used comparison between winning the lottery and getting struck by lightning. For the purpose of this illustration, we will use the assumption that your odds of getting struck by lightning are 650,000 to 1. When there were fifty-four numbers, you were almost forty times more likely to be struck by lightning. By reducing the number of numbers to fifty-one, your lightning strike probability plummeted to only twenty-seven times more likely than winning the lottery. Kind of makes you feel safer walking in an open field during a thunderstorm, doesn't it?

Now, unless you are a very naive person, you have probably already made the assumption that they brought those three numbers back out of retirement. You would only be partially correct:

FACT TWO: They have increased the number of numbers from fifty-one to fifty-nine!

They not only went back to where it started, but they made it even worse. Going back to the trusted lightning comparison, the odds are now over sixty-nine times greater that you will be struck by lightning.

However, by failing to mention these two facts, the advertisers have managed to find a way to make people believe that they actually have a better chance of winning. In reality, you're better off trying to start that career as a human lightning rod.