This is probably not the kind of gambling the OP had in mind but several years ago my dad nearly won the Louisiana lottery. This was in the early 90's when LA first started running their lottery. The jackpots started at 1 million and grew slowly by today's multi-state lottery standards. One of the early pots got up to 20 million. My dad dropped $20 on some quick picks. At the time, the lottery consisted of drawing only 6 numbers out of the same pool of numbers, no power ball selected from a separate pool or anything of the sort. On one ticket my dad matched 4 of the 6 numbers. The other two numbers that didn't match were each only off by one. To make matters worse, those two numbers that didn't match were in the line of numbers directly above the line that had the 4 that matched. The night of the drawing my dad let me stay up and check the numbers first. When I showed him what happened he responded with a mixture of mild anger, disgust, and broken-hearted resignation. He was pretty miserable working at the job he had at the time and was oh so close to holding the golden ticket to happiness or at least freedom from some misery. That ticket scored him $50. I sometimes wonder how different life would have been had he scored the big one.
