Fighting The Sale of "Married Numbers" in the Panamanian Lottery

By DON WINNER for Panama-Guide.com - If you've really been paying attention lately you might have heard people complaining about the sale of "married numbers" for Panama's National Lottery. Here's what happens. Everyone has a favorite number, and a lot of people want to buy numbers that mean something to them - most often a birthday or something like that because they think those numbers are luckier. Of course there are 99 numbers playing in the lottery but there are only 31 days in the month. Therefore, there's a higher demand for "lower" numbers (from 1 to 31) and the people selling the lottery numbers don't want to be given the "higher" numbers because they are harder to sell. The people who hand out the the tickets have been playing favorites (thanks to the payment of bribes, no doubt) so that some people get more "lower" numbers and less "higher" numbers, while others complain that they can't get any of the more popular lower numbers to sell. Then on the street they sell the numbers as "married" meaning that if you want to buy a lower number then you're required to buy a ticket with a higher number as well. The vendors do this in order to "entice" (force) the buyers to take the relatively unpopular higher numbers. And of course this practice is illegal - the lottery ticket vendors are required to simply sell the numbers they are given and they can't force anyone to buy a ticket with a higher number or place any kind of condition on the sale of a ticket. Anyway, the government is now taking steps to clean this whole thing up by more closely regulating how the numbers are issued to the sellers in the first place, and to take corrective administrative action against those sellers who try to sell "married" numbers. This might sound like a trivial little thing, but the National Lottery is incredibly important to the hundreds of thousands of Panamanians who play every week and who track this stuff like hawks. Anyway, that's what's going on. If you pick four numbers and get them right, your $1 ticket is now worth $2,000 bucks. Good luck.

Copyright 2009 by Don Winner for Panama-Guide.com. Go ahead and use whatever you like as long as you credit the source. Salud.