Kate trading

I think there's an easy way to solve the riddle. Has anybody stepped up to claim a nicked "winner" card? And a picture of one would be great. In theory if this was all an honest mistake, there should be plenty of nicked winners. If it's only losers, then this gets a lot more suspicious.

 

you could tell if it was a winner without scratching see how the winner's border triangles under the scratch off paint are filled in white and the losers are black. Pretty lame design.

 

lol, I totally didn't notice that till you said it, but you are right, that would make it crazy easy to tell winners from losers without scratching at all.

 

another reason not to ebay....
I went up on Friday night after the tickets one sale announcement on thier blog. I am glad I went when I did, the tickets definitely seemed to be "streaky" as some have said.

 

I got tickets in the mail yesterday. I have my fair share of nicked cards, and none of them are winners. I haven't scratched any of mine yet (we will do it at a tasting tomorrow) but I know which are the winners based on the exposed pictures. None of the nicked cards are winners.

 

This is all starting to look worse and worse. Aren't these tickets run under NH Lottery oversight?

At the very least Portsmouth should be publicly acknowledging this and warning people not to trade or buy tickets on Ebay.

For example, there is a very odd auction up with 14 tickets. He has a group picture of them, and 8 are visible, and clearly losers based on the arrow placement. Anyone willing to bet against the fact that he got 1 winner out of 15, recognized the other 14 as losers without scratching, and is now putting them up for auction to try to make $100?

I'm most confused how this could have gone so relatively smoothly last year and had so many logistical issues with the tickets this year.

 

I think a lot of it had to do with that it was the first year, but there were problems then too. I've read that if you held the ticket up to the light, you could see if it was a winner or looser. I'll try to find that post as well, but it may be lost at this point. I'm sure people traded away scratch tickets they knew were losers last year just like there were people doing this year.

 

I would be very surprised if any winning unscratched tickets are being exchanged in trades or sold on ebay.

 

I don't think muling is frowned upon-- at least not in general.
The problems became;
*the posts were clogging up the forum
*people were demanding outrageous things just to pick up some bottles for another person.
*it was such a polarizing issue that a large number of users couldn't stay away from arguing about "what's fair"
*the bros decided that if money was changing hands then it is "selling" beer which is explicitly against the site TOS.

I can (and have) sent BMs to people I know and Have worked out deals-- the difference was that we kept it out of the forum and by doing so avoided the shit-show that inevitably results.

 

Yup, I've also done extensive mule-shipping for previous trade partners. Typically they pay for their bottles and just either mail me a shipping label or do that nifty thing where they email me a bar code that can be read by the scanner at the shipping facility. Without it most of those same people wouldn't have gotten bottles because it would have necessitated me having the extra cash to buy and then trade $4$.

 

The silence from PB is mysterious to say the least. From what I can see they neglected to even acknowlege the posts on their FB page from customers who raised concerns. I have no horse in the race, stayed away from the shitshow this year. No regrets.

 

I picked up 30 for a BA in Michigan who went 0-30. I felt really bad about it so I am trading a bottle of mine for something completely reasonable. Not everyone wants ridiculous shit for picking up some tickets.

 

Bet if they do choose to do scratch tix again they wont try to be different about it and have jagged edges around it and just be square or circle like a real lotto ticket.

 

Wow, it's amazing that they managed to make scratch-off tickets that don't have to be scratched off in order to determine whether or not they're winners - it's clear from the side-by-side photo that winners have some white showing in the top-left border, while the losers are solid black. Who wants to bet that the recipients of the 15-for-15 packs were friends of an employee who got to shuffle the packs? The odds of getting winning 15 times in a row in a game with 1/7.5 odds are, what? (1/7.5)^15? That's ASTRONOMICAL! And they said that it happened for TWO different people!

I officially call shenanigans!

 

Bring it on: I'll block your pistol-whip with my broom.

 

I don't quite understand the situation here. Are the prescratched tickets coming from the brewery, or from a third party seller?

It just doesn't seem likely that the brewery or its employees would want to screw over the people buying tickets.

In any case, sounds like a real cluster.

 

Somebody makes them for Portsmouth Brewery, then the brewery sells them directly from their gift shop. They are loose - not connected like your standard lottery scratch tickets. So there's a bit of an assumption that the employees are responsible for shuffling them up, i.e. the winners come in one box and the losers in another, but I haven't heard anything definitive about that.

Either way, there's no question that employees see the tickets before selling them to people, so there is certainly room in the process for malicious behavior.

 

Hey Farva what's the name of that restaurant you like with all the goofy shit on the walls and the mozzarella sticks?