Lottery players dream of a green Christmas

Jeffrey Libby

Tuesday, Dec. 24, 2002 | 10:48 a.m.

WHITE HILLS, Ariz. -- The owner of the sole cafe and bar in the "Capitol of Nowhere," Rose Larsen dreamed of a new tin roof on Monday as she cleared discarded Powerball scratch sheets from a table she had set for her annual public Christmas supper.

Larsen has one of the few sure bets in the estimated $280 million Powerball jackpot drawing Christmas Day -- she gets a cut of every ticket she sells.

Rose's Den, her U.S. 93 roadside pit stop 30 miles south of Hoover Dam, is the closest Powerball stop for most of Las Vegas, and with the lottery reaching its third-highest mark, Las Vegans not unfamiliar with long odds are beating a path to her door with their own dreams of a green Christmas.

"It's the capital of the universe," said Rose's son, Norm "Hitch" Larsen, as he took a break from running one of the store's two Powerball machines. "Everyone comes here."

Outside the remote cafe, the desert stretched cold and uninterrupted for miles in all directions. Inside, strung tinsel sparkled in the heat blowing from behind the low, dark bar. There was no music, only quiet conversation, and the Las Vegans seemed right at home.

They stood in two lines, heads bowed, penciling in their lucky numbers to the steady buzz of the dot-matrix printer scrawling them out.

Las Vegan Susan Pearson, 44, said the drawing, which will be held Wednesday night, would not distract from her Christmas celebration.

"Christmas and the kids, that is totally separate from this," said Pearson, who planned to buy 20 tickets.

Her husband, Derrick Pearson, 38, a Metro Police officer, already had at least one purchase in mind.

"I'd buy a Coach motorhome. I've already got my model picked out," he said.

"I'd get a Cadillac Escalade to pull behind it," Susan added.

For Las Vegans who play the odds, Powerball might not make a lot of sense. If it were a sports bet, the whole scene would have been a mirage.

"No one would even book it," said Cesar Robaina, senior oddsmaker at Las Vegas Sports Consultants, the company that sets betting lines on sporting events for Nevada casinos.

Robaina likened Powerball's long odds to a 54-point spread in a football game. The odds of hitting the Megabucks jackpot -- which has now reached $23.3 million -- are about 1 in 16.7 million; the odds of winning Powerball are about 1 in 120 million. The odds are far better for getting struck by lightning than winning Powerball.

"Fortunately there's not many games like that," Robaina said. "It'd be like a 27-year-old man fighting a 6-year-old kid."

Mike Orkin, a statistics professor at California State University, Hayward, and author of the book "What are the Odds?" had another analogy.

"Suppose that every time you drove a mile, you bought a Powerball ticket. Well, that would mean you'd have to drive an average of 250 round trips to the moon to win," Orkin said.

A Megabucks win would take an average of just 35 1/2 trips, Orkin said.

But at 240,000 miles each way, each round trip would require an investment of $480,000 for Powerball players, who shell out $1 per ticket.

Few in line Monday wanted to talk about the odds of winning.

Mike Kirby, 40, a cardiology technician at St. Rose Dominican Hospital in Henderson, was more concerned about his odds of keeping it once he'd won it.

"All this goes on capital gains, so I've got to figure out a whole lot of capital losses," he said.

Bo Bernhard, a University of Nevada, Las Vegas, professor who studies gambling, said the allure of Powerball and other lotteries is at heart similar to much of American entertainment -- Christmas included.

It's all about the "anticipatory moment," Bernhard said. The moments leading up to the dream are more important than realizing the dream, Bernhard said. (Especially in the case of Red Sox fans, he cracked.)

"If you spend $20 and it gets you several days of anticipatory pleasure, who's to say that's not a valid purchase of entertainment time?" Bernhard said.

"We've always seen gambling as a less legitimate form of entertainment, but that's based on years and years of religious morality, of people saying it's wrong and of the devil. But as Americans we've sort of rejected that moral argument."

In the case of Arizona, one of 24 states that participate in Powerball, that entertainment value has meant an added $199.2 million paid to state and county general funds since 1994. In that same period Powerball players in Arizona, many of them Las Vegans crossing the border, have shelled out $664 million.

Last year Larsen's cut of the ticket sales allowed her to upgrade to commercial-grade refrigerators and freezers. This year, after the new tin roof goes up, she said she'll move several barrels from inside the cafe to outside, where they will continue to catch water.

"That can be radiator water. People can wash their hair. Whatever they want," Larsen said.