For those not familiar with the story, the Quebec Lottery offers a game titled Extra. The machine randomly picks a 7-digit number, and the player has to match as many digits as possible, in order, from a random draw. The matching digits can be aligned in either direction. The smallest prize is $2 for matching the right-most digit only. The largest prize is $1,000,000 for matching all seven digits.
What the plaintiffs in the lawsuit noticed was that if you purchased ten Extras then for the first and last digits the game picked one of each numeral. In other words, if you looked at the first, or last, position only then you would see all ten numbers from 0 to 9. The plaintiffs claim this gives them only two chances to win and is non-random.
I see their point. Almost all the variance in that game comes from the $1,000,000 jackpot. The standard deviation of ten completely independent random tickets would be 1002.845. The way the Quebec Lottery does it the standard deviation of ten tickets purchased at the same time is almost the same at 1002.833.
In my opinion if the player buys multiple quick pick lottery tickets each ticket should be independent of the others. However, I find the lawsuit of $20 million almost totally frivolous. If I were the judge, I would award the plaintiffs $1.
This question was raised and discussed in the forum of my companion site Wizard of Vegas.