Help me Hack the Lottery or, the worst $90 investment ever

The base of my sample program [implemented in ruby] was based (in theory) of Proportional Betting "The Martingale" - http://www.bjmath.com/bjmath/progress/prog1.htm

The game I picked was "Casino War" [ http://wizardofodds.com/games/casino-war/ ], as it was very quick to implement in a few lines of code. I selected the base rules as played in Garden City Casino [Bay Area] (50c drop per every $100), and came up with the following:

Game/House Rules: - 6 deck of cards. - Played until 1/2 is gone. - 50c drop for every $100 [Example: $200 bet costs $1, $300 $1.5.]

Betting Rules:

- Base Bet is always 1% of current wallet, at starting point - $10. - If the proportional bet can not be covered by wallet, the round is surrendered and the player waits until re-shuffle. [Example: Lost up to $500, next bet is $1000, wallet has $700, game ends/waits and the player accepts a loss of $300.] - Bets are doubled on loss as defined in the Proportional betting link.

Here's my data, though I believe something is wrong due to its results:

- I ran the initial program, as is, expecting the player to play one round every day for 10 years. - Losses and earnings were added together. - The average win % went to 58.4%. - The average cash win [the times the player didn't go bankrupt] was $1590. - Max loss [consecutive] cash $2980. [Bankroll covered over multiple sessions]

* A key point here is the average cash win. It was highly consistent and never below 1500.

I then added a factor that stated in the software:

- If winnings are at $1500, the player stops, takes the winnings and waits for a re-shuffle.

* Win percentage went up to 64.8% !

If anyone is interested, I'd be happy to share/pastebin the code or similar. Overall, due to the percentages I'm assuming something is wrong with my assumptions/gameplay, but so far an interesting experiment.

[Edited for clarity on betting strategy]

We were told that each pack contains at least one winning ticket (it might be $5 or it might be $100K).

That's a definite weakness.

I question your detachment if you are calling gambling an "investment" at all. If you want to win at probability games, look at what any professional gambler does and stick your money down only when you can prove or reasonably expect to see a positive expected value given your odds. That's how basic strategy in blackjack and most of poker math works.

Also, I assumed ticket generation for the simple games was something brute-force-ish akin to:

1. Create your winning tickets. Fill in the rest of the numbers with things that won't cause duplicate wins on the same ticket pseudorandomly.

2. Make a random ticket. Check to make sure the ticket is not solved. If the ticket doesn't solve, add it to the stack of tickets.

Randomly shuffle all tickets. Print to rolls and cut. You could probably even get away with duplicate random "losing" tickets if you had enough of them because most people likely won't end up with the same losing ticket.