I Can’t Stop Playing the Texas Lottery…really

Duane Gundrum
2 min readMar 6, 2024

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A few years ago, I started playing the Texas Lottery. To me, it was no big deal. I figured I was never going to be filthy rich, just filthy. My writing was never going to make me rich; I was no Stephen King. And no rich uncle has ever come forward to lavish me with millions. So why not play the Lotto and imagine myself lavishing me with millions?

So I signed up for a weekly lotto purchase of $18.50 a week. Right about then, I got really sick, so I didn’t have the time or energy to check my weekly winnings haul. Okay, I once won $10 but that got invested automatically in my weekly losings.

After I got better and started paying attention to my weekly losings, I decided it was probably in my best interests to stop the lottery purchases, an instant realization hit me. This wasn’t weekly I was paying out. I was paying $18.50 on Monday, Thursday, and Saturday. I was a loser 3 times a week.

So I decided to cancel this continuous loss. If I wanted to feel like a loser, I could look at my regular life. I didn’t have to hire the Texas Government to point it out for me.

So I decided to cancel it, and that’s when I came to a very interesting observation: You can’t cancel your contribution no matter how hard you try. It appears that recently they changed their website and their app. The part that used to take you to the section to handle your membership and account has changed so that it now brings you to advertisments of their many lottery options. Not to cancel. The membership item you click on advertises in showing you more types of lotto advertisement. It’s like finding yourself in a website that keeps Rick rolling you through lottery options.

I spent the good part of an hour trying to find a way to stop playing the lottery three times a week. Cause running those odds, I’ve gone from a snowball in hell chance of winning the Powerball to dating Taylor Swift as odds go. In other words, I’m never going to win, so stop making me play the lottery.

This has convinced me that once you play lotto, you ALWAYS play lotto.

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Duane Gundrum

Author of Innocent Until Proven Guilty and 15 other novels. Writer, college professor and computer game designer.