THE CITY

In Every Card,
a Little God

The scratch-off lottery ticket and its alternative moral and economic community

Essay and Photographs by Pune Dracker

Look on the backside of any New York State Lottery scratch-off ticket, whether it’s a nine-inch, top-tier thirty-dollar ticket like Colossal Cash, or the holiday-themed Snow Me the Money that’s the size of a business card and costs just a buck. You’ll have to search, but there in fine print:

PLEASE PLAY RESPONSIBLY.

Struggling with a gambling addiction? Call the HOPEline.

Most critical literature on lottery players describes them as impoverished, uneducated, and vulnerable. “[T]he poor are still the leading patron of the lottery,” proclaims a 2011 research review in the Journal of Gambling Studies. The essay, “Gambling on the Lottery,” found 61 percent of lottery players in the United States fall in the lowest fifth in terms of socioeconomic status. With gaming commissions in many states reporting increases in lottery revenue after two rounds of COVID stimulus checks in April 2020 and January 2021, a DC-based antigambling group is calling for a suspension of lotteries.

Call the HOPEline.

That ticket in your hand? Turn it to face you. If it’s one of eighty-seven currently available New York State Lottery scratch-off tickets, there’s a good chance it’s purple, green, or blue. And ugly, at least by Restoration Hardware catalog standards. If it’s Snow Me the Money, for example, it’s blue, and it’s hard to tell if the snowman is blushing or just dirty. Why would someone want to buy this, again and again? And who? 

In the 2013 study, “Why the Poor Play the Lottery: Sociological Approaches to Explaining Class-based Lottery Play,” researchers hypothesize that people of lower economic means gamble as a method to “relieve the strain of monotony and meaninglessness in their personal and working lives.” 

Right—because of course we all know that life without money is meaningless.

Yet a 2016 Gallup survey found that, while 40 percent of lower-income Americans said they had played the lottery in the past year, the number jumped to 56 percent for middle-income, and 53 percent for upper-income Americans–challenging the idea that the lottery is a game for the poor.  Education level was not found to be a factor either: 47 percent of Americans with a high school diploma or less had played versus 53 percent of those with a college degree. These findings corroborate earlier polls from 1999, 2004, and 2007. But in spite of academic research that shows otherwise, lurking below the numbers is the mistaken, widely held belief that the lottery is a tax on the poor and uneducated, and the assumption that the only reason someone plays the lottery is to win it. 

What if I told you the researchers—and those who believe the conversation-stopper that the lottery is a tax on the poor—are overlooking a secret but in-plain-sight world, self-designed by the players within but at sometimes-odds with the entire lottery apparatus? What if phone surveys might not get at the truth of who plays the lottery and why and how, because players don’t want to talk about their playing on the record? Because it’s actually rather personal, and hard to explain to those not of their own kind. They’re a community.

This community connects groups of people who may not appear to be kin but are kin, a community with three things in common: 

• Highly specialized knowledge about scratch-off tickets and their technologies; 

• Rituals and strategies that are carried out regularly and repetitively, as a practice; and

• Positive cognitive state based on a sense of successful goal-directed determination and planning.

They buy a finely curated selection of tickets two times a week, always from 4 to 6 p.m.

They soak their fingernails in Clorox to remove stains from scratch-off residue.

They run out of their car while stopped at a red light in order to buy their daily tickets.

They host pot-luck scratch-off parties, hand-make floral bouquets and holiday wreaths out of tickets to sell on Etsy or give as gifts.

What if I told you this vibrant community runs on potential and loss and potential, looks into a funhouse mirror reflecting the current effed-up socioeconomic structure in America, counts their blessings, and keeps on scratchin’?

—

I am a scratch-off player, dropping my wishes along a bodega trail with each rite and ritual. These repeated steps and sequences I take and make are less about winning and more about me and the ticket and other players. I think of the ticket as a player, too, with more agency and a higher-speed connection to Fortuna than the rest of us. And each ticket is singular, and its disposition—winner or loser—is predetermined at the time of production, and again at the point of purchase.

This distinguishes the scratch-off ticket from a ticket for a draw game, like Lotto or MegaMillions, where players select or are assigned numbers, and wait for a televised drawing to find out if they’ve won. The relationship between player and instant lottery ticket is different, immediately co-dependent. An intense physical relationship in which the player executes a series of repetitive actions upon the body of the scratch-off ticket. It is one body scratching another’s itch.

In this relationship, one party already knows the outcome, in as much as a scratch ticket can know.

—

The most complex ritual I partook of was repeated daily on a monthly cycle for fifteen years. It takes two people, when the two people are almost one person, and it is known as Cashbox.

Cashbox opens with the sun rising over the East River and ends approximately four weeks later with Sal depositing our monthly rent, at least two days early. Its many parts can be broken down like this:

Things done: Starting the first of the month, Sal and I purchase scratch-off tickets daily at multiple retailers on our way to and from work. He plays orange, then green Cashword; I am usually red and pink Cashword, yet one sweet spring, the short-lived Frogger. The tickets are scratched at our kitchen table (he in the evenings after teaching dance, me in the mornings with coffee). Sal keeps a running tally of the day’s winnings. I redeem the tickets, and Sal organizes the bills by denomination; at month’s end he removes the cash and purchases two postal money orders that we use to pay rent. One for $1,000, the maximum amount in which a postal money order can be purchased, and the other for the remainder. Until he signs them and adds our address, they could be to or from anyone.

Things shown: When I start to play a new Cashword, Sal gets up from his chair and watches over my shoulder. He notes any animal words, laughs if I get H-I-P-P-O. Both of us call out the letters as I scratch them, incanted necklaces of A! A! A! A! or I! I! I! I! I! And always so many Es—nine, ten, sometimes eleven, these pre-speech eeks the most mesmerizing of all.

Things said:

Sal: “I have a little chance,” when he completes a word early in the puzzle and needs only two more to win.

Sal: “I’d be sick to my stomach,” when I suggest we add up how much we spend on tickets and compare it to how much we win.

Sal: “You have to stand up for yourself,” to me, when people push in front of me in the lottery line.

Me or Sal: “You don’t love me,” if the tickets we gift each other are losers.

With the overall odds of winning on any ticket roughly one in four or five, Sal and I, like all players, encounter losers more often than not. This only serves to renew our quest.

We’re Demeter searching for our Persephone, each win a mini-Eleusinian Mystery. 

Like observers of those ancient Greek ceremonies of initiation held each year around harvest time to honor and celebrate the season cycle, the eternal wheel turning life into death and life again, we celebrate each win, remember each loss. No one but us knows about Cashbox.  Likewise, anyone could participate in the Eleusinian Mysteries—but nobody was permitted to talk about them. 

Four thousand years later, three words survived to describe what took place: dromena, deiknumena, legomena. Things done, things shown, things said.

Things shown: Sal and I bought our cashbox from now-defunct Vercesi Hardware on East Twenty-Third between Second and Third Avenues. It is twelves inches long, gray like the skin of a kind elephant, and textured like raindrops clinging on a window. It’s impossible to lock because one of us lost the key. I place the money from the cashed-in tickets right in the top tray, while the space below is for winners awaiting redemption. Only recently, in one of the compartments I discovered a credit card-sized card featuring Jesus in a golden tunic, red and white lights shooting out of his waist like a bottle rocket. On one side: Jesus, en Ti confio! On the other: Jesus I trust in You!

I do an image search and learn it is blood and water gushing from his heart. 

Like many rituals, Cashbox is weird. But since we were never married, perhaps it was a renewed monthly commitment to each other. People said we walked down Twentieth Street as if in a bubble, holding hands even in CVS. 

Cashbox involved procuring money, but it was not about money. This is where a ritual differs from a strategy. Cashbox was the losingest thing we ever did. And we kept doing it, because it was like saying again and again: I’d rather lose money than lose you.

—

One January Friday at about 6 p.m. at the bodega on First Avenue between Twenty-First and Twenty-Second Streets, a man standing at the counter scratching a thirty-dollar ticket tells me he has been playing since the 1970s. I ask him how often he plays. “Five to six times a week,” he says, inserting his Colossal Cash into the ticket validating machine. “If you’re lucky,” he says, “it don’t matter what ticket you buy. You’re going to win.”

He’s scratching in public, so I assume he’d give a juicy interview for this essay. “No,” he says. “Honestly, no.”

Early February at another newsstand, a woman is scratching four or five tickets, so fast I can’t see which ones. I can only glimpse the colors: shiny blue, gold matte, emergency orange.

I judge her. My assessment is she does not appear to be enjoying herself, hunched over the tiny patch of counter in the crowded newsstand. All losers.

“Can I interview you about playing the lottery?” I ask her. “No,” she says. “I’m embarrassed.”

It’s not that they don’t want to talk. They don’t want to go on record.

Her losing tickets, any losing ticket, begin to expire the moment the player takes a coin, key or, in desperation, their own fingernail, and removes the coating that conceals the play area.

According to Madehow.com, this coating is comprised of an opaque material, such as carbon black pigment or aluminum paste, mixed with acrylic resin solvents. The organic chemicals and non-natural polymers do their job of letting no light shine through, obscuring the symbols and numbers beneath.

Yet as the player scratches—for some it feels less itchy and more of a tender rubbing—the coating is easily removed. The coating becomes a mealy residue, seeping into your thumb whorls and underneath your fingernails, stuck on the ticket like dirty cookie crumbs. Some players refer to it as debris or scrapings, wonder if it is an allergen (sensitive to latex? perhaps) or carcinogenic. 

An internet hoax started in 2011 claims Silver Nitro Oxide in the coating causes skin cancer. There is no such compound as Silver Nitro Oxide. 

One player refers to the debris as “snibbles.” For the eternally hopeful it is magic dust.

When Sal and I lost, we said we may as well have gone outside and thrown our money in the street, then watched it blow away.

—

It would be easy to say we’re ashamed because we’re spending money that we don’t have, because our families judge us for it, because we have no self-control, because we are lazy—all stereotypical ideas of a gambler. “But by reducing gambling to a collection of psychiatric symptoms or a sign of political corruption,” writes cultural and intellectual historian Jackson Lears in Something for Nothing: Luck in America, “critics have overlooked its wider web of connections to ancient, multifaceted rituals that have addressed profound human needs and purposes.”   Lears believes the debate about gambling is really about lifestyle. Do you believe more in a culture of chance, a universe that’s irrational and random, where chance brings possibility, grace and wisdom? Or a culture of control, which glorifies the rational and is guided by the belief that diligence and hard work bring money and success? In his review of the book in the New York Times, March 9, 2003, Caleb Crain pushes back with a nasty old narrative: “Why take a risk when it serves no end but the systematic fleecing of the gullible by organized crime and unscrupulous politicians? If you feel guilty about money, gambling is a clever way to unburden yourself: it enables you to give your money to strangers who deserve it even less than you do.” Lears has clearly pressed Crain’s tight-ass button.

If my fellow players are ashamed and embarrassed, why don’t they scratch in private? Doesn’t it take balls to do something that you’re embarrassed to do in public?

Or is it a kind of quasi-public confession: forgive me, for I have sinned. But I might win.

Who is listening anyway, or wondering why a lottery player might say: 

“I just did an entire book and there were no claimers in it.”

“I’m due for a hundo.”

“Give me one more so I can just get to balance.”

There are more than sixteen thousand places to play the lottery in New York State, including newsstands, bodegas, gas stations, convenience stores, delis, stationery stores, and grocery stores. Tickets are displayed in plastic cases or, for easiest access, hung clothesline-style. Less common are self-serve vending machines, offering draw games and scratch-off tickets. To the uninitiated, the lottery display and its jargon can be intimidating at worst, confusing at best. If the retailer employs a hanging method, you look up behind the counter and see a long row of tickets hanging in strips like kites, kites with flowing tails of luscious fruity grape, orange, and green, pulsing cubic zirconia.

“Superloud” is how the award-winning art director and educator Angela Riechers describes it, as I hold up various lottery tickets for her to look at during our Zoom interview. “Like they need to shout and be like, ‘Woo, over here.’” This is not surprising, given the environment where tickets are purchased, placed at the counter where they’re competing with magazines, gum, cigarettes and their lighters. “The competition is so fierce they need to have incredible color and bold type.”

All this honking, yet they still may remain hidden if one isn’t looking. “This doesn't look like a lottery ticket store,” says Youyou, a data journalist from Brooklyn, as we enter the newspaper and magazine store Lucky News & Communications, down the block from where Vercesi was on Twenty-Third Street. I want to see and play the lottery through the eyes of someone who has never played, and Youyou is game. Despite the neon blue-and-yellow MegaMillions and Powerball sign hanging front and center, announcing 257 Million! 90 Million! in lit-cigarette red, Youyou remarks, “When I see a store like this, I would only come here to buy drinks, to buy chips.” 

If the retailer has a display case, typically the tickets are arranged with the most expensive on the top, the dollar-cards at the bottom. But not always—tickets might be added ad hoc, with three of the five different cards in the Cashword family sitting together in the third row, a fourth plunked in the second-row center.

“This looks like a candy machine to me,” says Youyou, gesturing to the tickets in the display case. “But they all somehow look the same.”

She’s right. Imagine no matter what button you press, you’ll be dispensed a clot of melted M&Ms. “I bet there’s something about the way these are put together that is deliberately confusing,” Riechers remarked about the tickets themselves. “They require some focus so people don’t abandon them. All the things you tell design students never to do, they're doing them.” I recall her comments as she looked closely at Cash Wheel Multiplier: “Don't do a drop shadow unless you really need it. Don't do a gradient on top of a gradient. Don't do a heavy black outline. We call this ‘kitchen sink’ design.”  We call their names kitchen sink poems.

Yes, the scratching landscape is noisy. You fight to keep your wits about you at the counter. With the trippy dingbats and myriad, unrelated fonts; the aphoristic, often unpronounceable names (how would you ask for $2,500,000 Make My Year!?); the hissing colors and kissing colors. If the eyes could puke a rainbow, they would.

The truncated beeping of the scanner; the scratching sounds; the winning and losing vibes of other players; the uplifting three-note song the machine plays when a winner is redeemed; the desperation of the person behind you, craning their neck to see what ticket you bought because if you lose, the next one may be a winner—all this is happening at once as you purchase, and take, your chance.

In his work on rites and rituals, Scottish cultural anthropologist Victor Turner describes the space in which they transpire as liminal. When enacting a ritual, the participant is on the threshold, in limbo between everyday reality and a higher one—“a time of enchantment when anything might, even should, happen. Liminality is full of potency and potentiality.”  These words are also used to describe any unscratched lottery ticket. You cannot tell by looking if it is a winner or a loser, so until it is scratched or scanned, it is a mystery, a possibility. 

The scratch-off can be your ticket to a liminal space inhabited by others in the community. Players gain entry to this space through rituals as simple as wishing each other good luck. The day before a snowstorm this past winter, I am lingering in Lucky News when longtime player V-420—one of the many characters you will meet whose names have been changed to respect their privacy—stops by on her way home to the Bronx. V-420 requests a $20,000 Taxes Paid, then asks if Money Maker and Loose Change Doubler, which she has never seen before, are new. They are, and she buys two each. Behind V-420 is Graceful Scratcher, waiting to cash in her winning Black Titanium. V-420 puts her wallet and tickets in her bag, and just as she is out the door, Graceful Scratcher quietly wishes her good luck.

V-420 turns. “You, too,” she says to Graceful Scratcher. One initiate to another.

The key here—and this is why this simple ritual might be overlooked as a pleasantry—is the ordinariness of the setting in which it occurs. Like one of Turner’s meta-social rites, the Good Luck ritual takes place in quotidian spaces—think bodegas and grocery stores—and is hallowed for a limited time. The space does not extend to the guy who passes in front of V-420 on her way out, handing the store owner a dollar for his Daily News and cutting in front of her again to exit before her.

This ritual occurs in everyday online spaces as well, such as the Scratch Off Lottery Lovers Facebook group. To be accepted into this private, protected space, applicants answer one question: Why do you like playing scratch-off tickets? In the group it is safe to talk about things that you cannot discuss anywhere else, like how much you spend on tickets. 

The first post from the group to hit my daily newsfeed is usually: Good morning and good luck today! To which thirty, forty members will respond in kind: GL, let’s get it today, good luck to you hun, someone will win and it could be you! At least a third of them add: God bless you or a variant. Blessings, blessed! Feeling blessed. Seeking value in higher power, this nudges the ritual toward the sacred. 

To the initiated, the regular player, a ticket looks different from how others see it. Elena, a Hell’s Kitchen make-up artist who has been scratching since 1991, describes the diminutive Lucky 7s. “Nothing makes yellow stand out more than purple,” she says. “These are classic Easter colors. If you’re far away that’s all you’re going to see, the yellow calling to you, popping out and coming toward you. Get closer, and your eyes go back and forth to the purple, like you would view a painting.”

For me, the reason I scratch is I like to look at the cards and touch them. And I have a favorite. Two-dollar Cashword, all I have to do is look at you and I am a winner.

First the color of the frame: ill-bred and shameless, bossy flowers, a dildo on a vision quest. I ignore the text and see instead the shocking pink of French couturière Elsa Schiaparelli, who put it on silk and threw it against red and maroon, which appeared dead by association.

“The colour flashed in front of my eyes,” she wrote in her 1954 biography, Shocking Life. 

“Bright, impossible, impudent, becoming.” And, “pure and undiluted,” even though color theory says it’s tertiary, with its drops of silvery divine.

I am your tulle whispers Cashword, adjusting all her crinolines.

Cashword wasn’t always pink. The New York State Lottery rotates out the color of popular games every few years, and the pink one came on the scene in 2018. Before that, it was garden-equipment-green with a tire-tread pattern like it had been rolled over, the crossword grid a soothing, malted pink. Before that, lick-worthy orange, with a blue grid.

But go back, back to the earliest Cashword you can imagine. Lears traces the culture of chance to “the dim past, to the person who first cast stones or shells to read in their chance array the will of the cosmos—and perhaps to conjure its power…”

Lears might say the first Cashwords were runes, stones or wood on which the letters of the runic alphabet were inscribed. The Germanic peoples of the second century AD used them to cast spells and divine the future.

In Finnish, a rune meant “scratched letter.”

Imagine a hot pink Cashword back then, each of the letters a rune, each word on your crossword grid an answer to one of life’s questions: Will I win, and lose, love? Will I find work? How can I feed my family? Imagine the words on the Cashword you are holding in your hand now will answer such questions.

ABSENT ARTERY DILEMMA MERCIFUL

Hold the Cashword and feel the tiniest jabs when you run your fingers along the top and bottom edges where it is perforated, the place where it connects to the Cashword before and the Cashword after. Have you ever touched the long edge? The sides are perforated, too, and you imagine this Cashword one patch in a magic carpet, the words on number 221 talking to numbers 220 and 222 above and below and side to side, each letter twinkling when scratched. Not just one Cashword. Cashworld.

—

After three months as a member of the Scratch Off Lottery Lovers Facebook group, I notice posts concerning a kind of activity that is not at all like ritual. It does not seek to slow time but speed it up to a desired outcome: WINNING. A strategist will buy Black Titanium, not because it is black and shiny or because they like the number on the card, but because have checked the lottery’s weekly report and know that the top prize for that game is still available. If the winning ten-million-dollar ticket is already claimed, why bother? As one player comments, “You have zero percent chance of winning it.”

These strategists know to look on the back of any ticket for the official odds of it being a winner, and then chase the win by purchasing a minimum, based on those odds, of four sequential tickets. To minimize overhead, tickets may be purchased one at a time: The player buys a ticket, leaves the lottery line to scratch it, runs it through the scanner, redeems it or, if it’s a loser, keeps buying until a hit. One Facebook group member looks for losing tickets in the trash by the scanner and buys the next ticket on that roll. But beware of Shadow Scratcher, who may be lurking in the store and targeting anyone buying top-tier tickets. If a player scratches several losers in a row, Shadow Scratcher “sneaks in like a snake” to purchase the next ticket, which statistically has better odds. While many players won’t do this out of respect, fact is, it’s fair game.

“In a society such as ours,” writes Lears, “where capital accumulation is a duty and cash a sacred cow, what could be more subversive than the readiness to reduce money to mere counters in a game?” Or to bright-colored cards that must be defaced to realize their potential? All over YouTube you’ll find videos of players doing nothing but scratching tickets. The viewer’s eyes are taken up by the ticket, the disembodied hands holding it, the coin used to scratch it; the viewer’s ears taken up by play-by-play narration—usually a male voice—and the sounds of scratching.

“Let’s have a phenomenal session,” TICKET SCRATCHER NYC begins his early March’s “Profit Session” video. He addresses the first ticket he is about to scratch: “C’mon beautiful number seventeen, do me right today.”

I watch as he scratches $400 worth of 100X tickets—twenty tickets at twenty dollars each. The force and cadence of his rubbing, combined with the fake gold coin he’s using, give me a sleazy feeling, so I start clicking around his channel to see his other videos: “HUGE WIN!” “GREAT WIN!”

“HUGE Comeback!”

“Trump will WIN at the END—GOD has chosen TRUMP.”

Could there be a pocket of Tiny Trumps among the strategists? The scratch-off world is a portable peewee casino you play by yourself, so I am not surprised there’s a crossover.

“Be sure to subscribe,” Tiny Trump tells the viewer. “It gives us the dynamic strength to keep on posting.”

—

Me and Sal, we failed at capitalism. He, a Broadway dancer and teacher who didn’t pay his taxes for ten years and stole toilet paper from the dance department at the Y because he thought they were mistreating him (they were). Over time the manager noticed the mysterious increase in need, and kept it in a locked closet away from the “toilet paper bandit.” And me, the only person in nonprofit history to refuse a salary increase in protest of mismanagement of donor funds, and asked instead to set up a cat adoption fund called Kitten Karma. It never happened. But Sal did give the manager at the Y a fake scratch-off ticket that revealed a $10,000 win.

“Again, I love you so much!! And I love our cats so much!!! What else does anyone need but that,” he wrote in a note to me. Because the Toilet Paper Bandit has eternally good kitten karma.

It is a Sunday before Christmas, and Lilly McEvoy of the Scratch Squad has started her weekly livestream on YouTube, greeting attendees by their handles, each name scrolling in and filling up a new row in the chat.

“Gilbert, hello! Hi, Smiley Face! Crystal, what’s going on?” Lilly’s voice is spring green and blingy, a little like the 100X tickets that she will be scratching today. “Lucy, Latoya, Mr. Robot, There’s A Snake In My Boot…welcome to the stream! I am soooo excited, you guys!”

It’s a big day today because Lilly is scratching $1,000 worth of tickets—a book of fifty at twenty dollars each. And just for the occasion, she’s painted her nails bright red to match.

Over the course of the session, Lilly engages in many player rituals—talking to the tickets, calling out the numbers like an invocation, ringing a bell with every matching number, scratching the last digit of the prize amount first to see what size the zeros are (larger ones mean a hundred-dollar winner or more), using special oversized coins to scratch. At one point, she pulls out a cat-shaped figurine with an on-and-off switch. “Do you guys know Pusheen?” Lilly asks, guiding a tiny plastic tabby around the table, over the scratcher debris. “She’s a cat,” she says. And not just any cat—a limited-edition, sold-out chonky mini-vac.

In between, she shares personal details—that she’s studied theater, her favorite restaurant, and that she’s “not gonna cry” when the crowd swells to 250. “You guys are absolutely incredible!”

In this little corner of YouTube, I am here as part of a community, one of 251. I am reminded of “everyday communism,” anthropologist David Graeber’s idea of mutual aid, “the sharing of pleasures, the communion of the senses, all the physical embodiment of what was called ‘good neighborhood.’” Graeber states that “communism is something that exists right now to some degree, in any human society,” and that “all of us act like communists a good deal of the time.”

Now, think radically: Those who partake in lottery rituals are not just communists but community-ists. We believe that the pool of potential lottery winnings, the sum total of all outstanding winning tickets at any given moment, is there for us. As we give to the pool, so we take from the pool. We wait patiently for our turn as others get theirs. We hold the space for others by holding our own—hoping for the grace that allows us to take a risk but not lose anything. The grace that allows us to get to balance, moving ahead in a spotless, boundless zero. This, for Lears and the ritualists, is one of the ultimate jackpots. “More elusive than luck or fortune,” he writes, “it is what happens when openness to chance yields a deeper awareness of the cosmos or one’s place in it—when luck leads to spiritual insight.”

If Lilly and Pusheen win, that means we can win, too.

This is how the community works: always someone on a lucky streak. Always someone’s field is fallow. Always a chance someone who has never played will win it all, first try. You might ask why. We don’t.

You don’t just get to balance. You have to cultivate it. Getting to balance applies to the total amount lost and won in one session (i.e., spend fifty, win seventy, spend ten, win ten), in one week, in one month or any other time frame. A ritualist needs the ability to add and subtract on their feet, and willpower.

You can also get to balance on an individual ticket, as demonstrated by Graceful Scratcher in Lucky News. She is playing a two-dollar Money Maker ticket, and points out the “$$” symbol she has revealed. A non-numeric symbol in the prize field is a big deal. “When you see symbols like that, it’s an instant win,” she says. “You win double whatever is under the symbol.” Because the Lottery must pay out at least a card’s face value, she knows that under the “$$” is at minimum a dollar—what we see when she removes the coating. She breaks even.

“I guess I’m not going be blessed up today,” she laughs, without bitterness. Minus the up and you’re still good.

Almost an hour in to Lilly’s session, she talks about the weather. “It’s getting really cold out,” she says. “You know what to wear when it’s cold? Hoodies. You know who has hoodies? I do. Check the link.”

Now it makes sense when, earlier in the stream, she shared an index card with a list of names and, responding to a question in chat that I wasn’t tracking, said aloud, “Fifty dollars for a spot, and twenty-five for a half-spot.” That’s how much they paid for a share in the tickets she is scratching. Later, when she shows us the mango-flavored spiced hard seltzer she’s drinking, I’m not sure if it’s an endorsement.

While Lilly is a consummate host practiced in and performing the community’s rituals, in the end she’s not purely a ritualist, but a clever strategist working outside the system. I learn hers is one of many channels that host sessions where subscribers mail in or remit “donations' ' via a third- party app to share in the winnings. There is something exciting and illicit about how the sessions are run and the rules they follow—like they’ve somehow re-illegalized legalized gambling.

But it is a far cry from wishing your fellow scratcher good luck. Because in the end, Lilly’s the one with three thousand-plus subscribers and three tiers of monthly membership levels of 2.99,  6.99, and 19.99. She’s the one who announces without apology that the thousand-dollar book yielded $700 in winners, and that those who bought the fifty-dollar spots would get thirty-five in credit.

Two Springs ago, I hit on Take Five—a claimer, named as such because any prize over six- hundred dollars cannot be cashed in at a retailer, but instead is claimed in person at a lottery redemption center. At that time, all of the Claim Centers were closed due to COVID, but when they reopened I made an appointment to pick up my $663 at the closest one, on the ground floor of Resorts World Casino in Jamaica, Queens.

Getting off the A Train at the Aqueduct/North Conduit stop, I’m not sure what direction to walk in, but the two women ahead of me have a certain swagger and style.

“It’s right across the street,” says the lady in a chic orange puffer, pointing to the hotel next to the racetrack. “We come here every month,” says her friend in the soft lavender scarf.

I remember Sal saying when you go to a casino, set a limit and bring only what you’re willing to lose. I say this out loud.

“That’s how to play!” says Soft Lavender Scarf, holding up her little white pouch with purple flowers. Inside, she says, is the cash she has brought with her to the casino. She doesn’t tell me how much, but she will not spend any more than this prescribed amount. There is no plastic credit card inside to be profferred in a desperate pinch to one of the ATM machines on site. This is the A-train, Resorts-World, pandemic-style iteration of the sacred bundle, a symbol of divination that Lears writes about in Something for Nothing. The sacred bundle is a bag or box bursting with miscellaneous things, each able to hold varied and fluid meanings, and each charged with mana, “the spiritual power that pervades, sustains, and rules the cosmos,” “a kind of first principle of potentiality, suffused with hope and foreboding.” I recall the photo that Smithers B. posted in the Facebook group of a pink leopard-print pouch containing his winning tickets. “I really do good at not “spending” out of my wallet,” he says, until he’s ready to “go in and find out which ones I’m trading in.” As if they let him know directly when they’re ready.

On the A Train home with my check from The New York State Lottery and Form W-2G Statement for Certain Gambling Winnings, I think about the restraint and discipline it takes to set a limit and stick to it. Hit it and quit it. I think of how those who embrace a culture of chance require what Lears calls “a willingness to live with unresolved conflicts—to embrace accident while affirming the possibility of transcending it, to acknowledge absurdity while sustaining a vision of cosmic coherence.” The little pouch represents this; each month it is refilled with conflict and possibility, in pursuit of that divine ka-ching when grace intervenes—grace bestowed by a force that the recipient may or not believe in, and grace as a mode of response to a variety of situations—particularly shitty ones.

Grace is keeping your magic pouch at balance.

Grace is not the man from Elmira, NY, who felt “shocked” and “disrespected” after buying a losing Wheel of Fortune ticket that spelled out the words YOU ELMIRA TRASH. After a full police investigation of the New York State Gaming Commission, he couldn’t accept that it was a random coincidence.

Grace is understanding that some people will win more, and more often, than you.

Grace is the Kansas woman who bought her first-ever scratch-off ticket—a Cash Cow, because she likes cows—to celebrate her eighteenth birthday, and won $25,000.

Grace is not blaming the person behind you in line who bought a $25,000 winner. Because maybe if they weren’t standing behind you and rushing you (they weren’t), you would have bought the winning ticket (you wouldn’t).

Grace is understanding that you may not understand it.

I have not forgotten that PLEASE PLAY RESPONSIBLY on the back of every card. But I ask you to think twice the next time you see someone buying a scratch-off ticket. Maybe that person is in their sacred space, and believes in a force of good they or you cannot see, that a quotidian object you buy at the bodega and hold in your hand represents equity—something hard to come by in this country and hard-won if it is. 

Pune Dracker is a writer, editor and activist in New York City. She holds an MA in Design Research, Writing & Criticism from School of Visual Arts, and her lyric essays have appeared in Hyperallergic and Oculus Magazine. She teaches dance and yoga, and her current work at CUNY Graduate Center focuses on 1970s teen idols through a lens of fashion and gender. Her art practice is inspired by The Situationists and the Fluxus movement.