Scratchcard Maths

Cool Cash might sound like the name of a Brooklyn rapper, but it’s actually the name of a scratchcard that had to be taken off the market because players didn’t understand the game. In fairness to Camelot, the problem wasn’t with the game itself, but with the fact that many players weren’t able to handle the kind of maths that a 12 year old should have down pat.

The concept was simple. Look at the negative temperature on the scratchcard (for example, -5) and scratch off a lower temperature to win. Those of you who paid attention at school rather than bunking off to grab a chip butty before the queues started will realise that a lower temperature than -5 would be -6 or -7. Unfortunately, all too many scratchcard players were convinced that a lower temperature was -4 or -3. This led many to believe that they had won a prize when they really hadn’t.

After responding to more phone calls than they cared to specify from players who wanted to complain about the game, Camelot decided to pull the plug on Cool Cash. Whether or not that was the right thing to do isn’t for me to say, but I do think that this whole affair has given scratchcard players a bad name.
 
For some reason, scratchcard players receive a hundred times more column inches in the newspapers when somebody does stupid than they do at any other time. Unless you happen to visit a lottery news site such as national-lottery.com, you will rarely read about any regular person who buys a scratchcard when he picks up his newspaper and is lucky enough to land himself a £50,000 prize. But when scratchcard players do something stupid like getting themselves into massive debt by playing beyond their means or failing to grasp basic arithmetic when playing a simple game such as Cool Cash, suddenly everyone wants to talk about it.
 
Of course, I’m talking about it now, but I hope that my previous entries demonstrate that I don’t focus on bad news by any means. Even now I’m trying to turn what is currently negative press (the insinuation I’ve seen in some places that all scratchcard players have the intellectual ability of chimps) into an appeal for more journalistic balance in the future.
 
So here’s my humble request to all the newspaper hacks out there. By all means cover the silly lottery stories, and when a scratchcard player does something crazy let us know about it. But be sure to tell us about the good news too. The majority of people who play scratchcards are just regular folk like myself who have as much intelligence as the next man or woman. And yes, most of us really do know that a temperature of -10 is colder than -5.

Article Last Updated: 13/11/2007 11:08:49

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