Winning the lotto and helping the poor filipinos
For such well-regarded government institution as the Philippine Charity Sweepstakes Office (PCSO) with lotto dealer outlets in almost every corner of this southern bustling city, it’s hard to disregard and ignore its impact in the lives of ordinary people here.
We’ve not gotten around to interview the local top official here, but bumping into impoverished farmers trying to get their children medical help and even hospitalization at the Maharlika Charity Foundation medical center along J. Cabaguio Avenue here — one gets a sense that all that money from sweepstakes and lotto sales are actually trickling down to the poor masses who desperately need medical help.
Maharlika Foundation is right on top of the office of PCSO, its main benefactor, along Cabaguio Avenue. And it is here where you bump into the poorest of the poor trying to get free medicines and free hospitalization from PCSO.
Not only do we see them at the PCSO office on some occasions, but also on the pages of a little red booklet titled “How To Win Lotto” which cited the PCSO for helping the poor in Davao seek free medical help
On page 23, it says “if you just drop by the Davao PCSO district office at J. Cabaguio Avenue on any working day, you will see very poor people lining up to seek financial and medical help from PCSO. Don’t be surprised why the Maharlika Charity Foundation which owns the building occupied by the PCSO is operating a free well-equipped hospital for the poor, right upstairs.”
The red booklet which was trying to justify one’s feeling of guilt in buying sweepstake or lotto, continued: “So you can think of it this way — buying a PCSO lotto ticket is like donating money to the poor and the sick with the added advantage and probability of amassing a large fortune, if you’re lucky.”
Although hundreds have already gotten a copy of this little red booklet “How To Win Lotto” from such bookstores as Velasco near city hall, Jade bookstore at Ateneo de Davao commercial building and Pen Haus at Victoria Plaza, there’s really nothing special nor scientific about it. Fact is, it doesn’t really guarantee winning the lotto.
Since jackpot lotto winners at PCSO are never identified, the booklet’s author also opts not to be identified openly except to say that it’s written by an “anonymous idiot” who ALMOST won the lotto jackpot. This simply means, he didn’t hit all the six sets of numbers to win the jackpot — he only hit five, but nevertheless got a fat Landbank check for it from Davao PCSO Office some years ago.
Well, idiot or not, there are two chapters in that red booklet (Chapter 4 and 5) that reveals the “secret system” of gathering all winning lotto numbers over five or six months and filtering out the “highest frequency numbers” that gives the most probability of hitting the jackpot’s six winning numbers. Now, whether this system actually works or not, no one knows, for sure.
Until now, it’s still debatable whether or not the red booklet has something to do with the two Davao lotto jackpot winners last year who won two of the country’s biggest jackpots. (We aren’t sure whether it was P145-million or P175-million).
Our best bet is: they probably won out of pure luck — because no one can really tell whether or not these two guys work out their own “winning system” using the red booklet as a reference. And there’s no way of knowing their identities, which will always remain secret for security reasons.
As the little red booklet concludes: “One can’t deny there’s still so much randomness to any system, secret or not, in trying to beat the odds of winning the lotto jackpot. The PCSO weekly lotto is so efficient, so open and transparent, there’s just no way one could figure out some kind of pattern of winning numbers can emerge and be captured in such a “scientific” system like this one.”
