Although it’s nearly impossible to get physical silver through official channels, Microsoft is once again coming to the rescue. In what will no doubt be seen as another historical blunder from the massive software giant, clever silver investors have been getting coins, bars, and rounds on the cheap, thanks to a head-scratching promotion launched in the summer by Microsoft. Dubbed it’s ‘live search cashback’ program, Microsoft has been giving away tens of thousands in subsidies for you and me to buy physical gold and silver. Yes, I’m serious.

A little background: Microsoft has been getting creamed by Google in the search arena. They tried and failed to get msn.com to be the search leader by virtue of having it be the default page on early versions of their internet explorer browser (newer versions make it easier for newbies to select their search provider). After going down in flames, Microsoft rebranded all things MSN to its more flashy Live.Com platform. Unfortunately, a duck by any other name is still a duck and rebranding can only go so far. That’s when they decided to start throwing money at us ala a Microsoft Stimulus Package. Live Casback, early on, was a patchwork network of ho-hum discounts at online retailers for price searching through Live’s proprietary price searching platforms. Discounts were generally a few percent competitively.

Then it all changed; Microsoft added eBay purchases to their eligible vendors, and the discounts were steep. We’re talking up to 35% off individual auctions (up to $200 savings per auction). Initially limited to just 3 purchases, Microsoft later upped the ceiling to 6, and now 12. They did this because they wanted to reward ‘loyalty’ to using the live.com search engine. While some people were buying Nintendo Wiis and designer handbags, the smart money was buying.. money.

Yes, due to what will be a fruitless last-gasp to improve their search rankings, Microsoft is willing to cut us a big break in what is effectively the real market for gold and silver, eBay. Here’s a little case study: Yesterday, I went over to live.com and searched for ’silver coins’. It really doesnt matter what term you use to trigger the eBay live cashback.. once the URL activates the promotion you can then really buy pretty much anything with ‘buy it now’ and receive the discount. You’re looking for the first sponsored link with eBay. Here’s a screenshot:

Click the link and it brings you to eBay. You’ll now see a little Microsoft cashback icon on the top of you pages: . If you don’t, then you might not have clicked through to eBay properly. Search for some coins in bulk - eagles, maples, philharmonics, whatever you’re in the mood for. Enter the quantity you want, then click Buy it Now. You’ll see the Microsoft cashback again at the bottom of the screen. If you don’t see the cashback icon, back up, as the auction may not be eligible for some reason or the cashback link expired (they are good for 60 minutes). If you see the cashback icon, you’re good to go and will confirm your buy on the next screen.

Microsoft is even kind enough to do the math for you. In ~ 70 days, you’ll have the money PayPal’d back to you. I’ve done it and although it’s indeed a wait, it’s definitely worth it.

The end result? In most auctions you can get your ultimate cost per ounce of silver down to about $14.50 and gold down to about $750. While you’re still going to pay a premium for silver (in my opinion, it’s the better choice right now), you won’t be paying as much as we’ve seen elsewhere. Only an outfit as backwards as Microsoft would be openly subsidizing a third-party buying hard assets while they get a worthless dollar or even more worthless advertising ranking in return.

The benefit to us? Cold, hard, cheap(er) silver. Kitco is sold out. Private mints are on a 8 week delay. National mints can’t meet demand. Ad-hoc exchanges (like nucleo exchange) are bidding nearly $16. For the rest of us at the bottom of the totem pole, we’re somehow getting the best price. Go figure. Who knows how long the promotions or the sky-high discounts will last, so load up now while you can. For my money, I prefer the Canadian Maple. You get the same 1oz .999 silver as any other bullion piece, but a much higher face value. At it’s $5 CAD face value, you get $4.14 USD at present exchange rates. That’s significant, because I remember not long ago when silver was less than $4.14/oz. If silver were ever to be manipulated-to-hell once again, you’d be somewhat protected in the exchange ratio. Don’t forget last year the US Dollar was at parity with the Canadian Dollar. Compared to the silver eagle ($1 USD), Vienna philharmonic ($1.90 USD), and the Austrailian Kookaburra ($.66 USD), the maple is by far the highest face value. Barring some major shifting in exchange rates, it’s going to stay that way for quite a while.

After being the subject of the ‘Zero Chance Games‘ debacle over the summer, Virginia has again thrust itself into the national lottery spotlight by erroneously printing winning tickets to one of its new terminal games. This time, the lottery’s ‘Fast-Play Super Sevens’ was printing out winners left and right, with some players thinking they’d won up to $7,777. The problem? The barcode on the bottom of the ticket didnt match the number of 7s being displayed on the card. The result? Lots of $2 or $3 ‘winners’ when folks thought they could pay off that credit card bill.

No worries, though. The lottery did the right thing and settled with the players, offering them up to $2,000 for those $7,777 wins. Not bad for a misprint.

Take a look at this article over at CNN. A video feature is available too. A Virginia man is suing the state lottery for breach of contract because the instant game he purchased had already sold all of the top prizes. While his plight has garnered some support while reviewing the various comments about this story, we think it’s fair to really examine the claims here in depth.

Mr. Hoover says he was felt ‘duped into buying these things’. I find that highly contentious; it’s hard to blame a third-party for an adult’s decision to buy a lottery ticket. If this guy has enough dough to retain a lawyer to sue the state lottery, I can’t believe he’s up in arms about losing on a scratch and win. Let’s get to the merit of his point though. His lawyer says, “It’s one thing to say it’s a long shot to win the $75,000, but it’s another thing to say you have no shot to win it”. Again, another statement I’m not exactly comfortable with. In fact, the Virginia Lottery does display it’s available prize listings, just like the NJ Lottery, on its website. If Mr. Hoover wanted to make an informed ‘investment’ in instant games, surely it is his responsibility to review all material available for him to understand the prizes left and what his odds actually are. We’ve outlined this on our strategy post rather comprehensively.

The question then becomes, if a game’s top prize is cleaned out, should it be pulled from shelves? According to the article, Virginia ‘no longer’ allows games without top prizes to be sold. It’s not clear how recent that policy is. It is my belief, however, that games should NOT be pulled just because the top prize is gone. Here in NJ, the tickets say that we can win ‘up to’ a certain amount of money. That includes all of the smaller prizes, which in some cases, are a fairly large return against the purchase price of the ticket. Let’s look at Gold Dust, a $10 NJ instant game. The $1M and $250K prizes are gone, as openly displayed on the available prizes website. However, there are still (11) $10,000 prizes available, which represents over a 1,000% gain for a player. I’m not saying I would recommend anyone to play a game with the top prizes gone, but if you do, you certainly have a chance of winning more than you bet. Being that the maximum I’ve ever won on a single ticket is $56, I’d be happy with a $100 winner, let alone a $10,000 winner. To say this is ‘false advertising’ or to expect the lottery to mobilize it’s vendor network to start pulling cards when the highest prize goes is a bit of a stretch in my opinion.

The game Mr. Hoover is suing VA for.

Here’s what concerns me. Let’s say the lottery comes out with some blockbuster new $1M instant game. Let’s also just say, by chance, that the (3) $1M tickets are sold in the first week due to incredible demand and a little bit of luck. NJ quickly nixes the game, and besides a lot of smaller prizes, now has to set aside the $3M for the winners. Without the revenue from the rest of the game, to let the odds play out (essentially, to let the lottery make its 65% on as much of the game as possible), how in the world does the lottery stay in business? Can you imagine if slot machines turned off after someone won the progressive jackpot? Seriously. Not to mention, what constitutes an acceptable prize level? In our Gold Dust example above, is the lottery to abandon an untouched lot of $250,000 cards on the table because three people got lucky and won the top prize? The only way the lottery can reliably function is to sell as much of the games as they can. In many states, they are already borrowing against future lottery revenues to finance state government projects. The lottery may need to better inform people about the remaining prizes and their individual odds, but to start pulling games when the top prizes go not only damages the lottery, but damages that player that might have won the $10,000, $50,000 or $250,000 ‘lesser’ prizes.

I think there are some major problems with the lottery. I don’t like the egregious 55% payout on $1 games here in NJ, and I don’t like that a $20 ticket has the same 65% payout as a $2 ticket. Much like slot machines, higher-risk players should be rewarded with better odds ($100 slot machines often pay 99% or more over time). That said, the administrative task of pulling active tickets when the top prizes are gone can’t be cheap, and the more expenses we put into the lottery the less we’ll be able to win in the future.

My advice to anyone who agrees with the $85M lawsuit? Read our strategy section. Research the rules, odds, and available prizes left. If there isn’t a great card left where you buy them, go somewhere else or don’t play! We’ll keep everyone updated on the status of this lawsuit as developments are made public.

To a casual observer, there is very little strategy in playing instant games. That’s the kind of thinking, though, that keeps the dedicated player focused on playing games they have some reasonable mathetmatical chance of winning. Casual players eat through loads of series with little or no major prizes left and tend to leave a few unpopular games ripe for the picking. Consider a game like Flamingo Double Bingo, launched in April, that still has eight prizes of $20,000 left, and almost 400 unclaimed $500 wins sitting on the table. My guess is that the gambling populous was a little overexhausted with bingo games, and let this one slip by. A smart player, though, is going to pass on any number of new cards launched in the last month or two and find a much better value in grabbing Flamingo Double Bingo.

So how exactly does one go about playing to win? Let’s be realistic, it’s still a game of odds and not skill. What we can do, however, is make sure the odds are maximized against how much we are willing to spend and what prizes are available.When you’re got some dough and are ready to go out and buy some, take a few minutes and do some research. Visit the NJ Lottery Unclaimed Instant Prizes list and carefully review it. Jot down or take a mental note of some of the games that have the most remaining top prizes. We’ve taken the currently list and X’d out games we’d pass on and circled the games we’d play. Take a game like ‘7th Inning Stretch’; it’s got a single $50,000 prize left and all of 22 prizes of $1,000 left. Out of 4.8M tickets, that’s not a terrific opportunity. On the flip side, although the 6M-card Tic Tac Toe has more than 20% more tickets to burn through, there are nearly 1,000 prizes left of above $500. It’s not an exact science, but you can usually clearly find a game or two that has plenty to win across the board.

Once you’ve found a few games you like, it’s time to set a budget and figure out what you’re going to buy. In our example above, if you wanted to play $10, you’ve got a bunch of choices. What we recommend doing, though, is NOT buying one of each card so you can play a lot of different games. The odds are stated on the NJ Lottery site, and you need to consider them carefully. Let’s figure out the best way to work our $10 play.

$2 Big Money Spectacular: Better than 1 in 5 Wins a Prize
$2 Bingo Zone: Better than 1 in 4 Wins a Prize
$3 Tic-Tac Toe: Better than 1 in 4 Wins a Prize
$3 Crossword: Better than 1 in 5 Wins a Prize
$3 Win for Life: Better than 1 in 6 Wins a Prize

Some simple math: We could only buy a maximum of (3) $3 cards, while we could grab (5) $2 cards. Since the odds of winning on the $3 tickets are, at best, 1 in 4, there’s a 25% chance we’d win nothing at all. Moving over to the $2 cards, Bingo Zone has better odds than Big Money Spectacular. Buy spending the $10 entirely on (5) Bingo Zone cards, you’d mathetmatically guarantee yourself at least one winner and additionally give yourself a 25% chance to win on a second card. Notice how, by choosing the right cards, you go from a 25% chance to winning nothing at all to a 25% chance of winning two. Keep in mind that the odds are only averages, so it’s completely possible you could lose on 5 cards where the odds are 1 in 4. Someone, somewhere, might have won two in a row and just evened out the average. From experience, though, you should consistently win near the averages.

Keep in mind, though, that the odds are still against you. It’s still a gamble. By playing with a little bit of smarts, however, you can ensure you’re gambling with a shot to win something, and not just pouring money into a dead game.

Let’s summarize:

- Find tickets that have the most prizes you actually want. Let’s face it, it’s nice to win $10, but we’re all here looking to hit that $30,000.

- Check out the odds and weigh them against how much money you want to spend. Determine a plan of purchase before you’re in the store.

- Be reasonable with your expectations. It’s a lottery, after all.