One of the great things about college is that you can take electives that have nothing to do with your major or even have any significance. You take them for fun and as a break from your regular hectic schedule. So a friend of mine convinced me to take a sports ethics and gambling class. We learned about everything from horse racing bets to the euro lottery.
We talked in depth about the ‘euro millions' for some reason in our class and about how it is one of the biggest lotteries because it has nine participating countries so when someone doesn't win that week, it rolls over to the next week and becomes larger and larger. You can check the UK lotto results online and we did so and talked about the chances of winning and how many people have played and how long it has been since the last winner and even the average amount of time between winnings.
The class takes something simple that most people take mindlessly (like buying a lotto ticket) and goes into great depth and actually spells out your chances of winning. It is really cool to actually look so far into statistics but in a fun way that the whole class enjoys.
We even get to go to casinos and beforehand we learn about the games and we talk about winning and odds in games like poker and blackjack and the slot machines. And then we go as a class (there is a casino about 30 minutes from our university) and we get to play with an allotted amount of money. And then afterwards we go back and talk about what happened. We even got to watch the movie 21 when we talked about card counting.
And then for a few weeks we discussed horse racing and we went to the track and talked about what the racing forms meant and it was actually a lot of fun to go as a class. I have been going to the race track my whole life with my dad and knew already most of the things the teacher was talking about but it was still a lot of fun to go and experience it all in a class setting.
It is great that the school offers classes like these. We are able to have a great time, while relaxing and actually learning.
