Eighteenth-century lotteries

Lotteries have been the playground for big successes and immense losses for at least six centuries. Games of chance have a much longer history. People have been throwing the dice for millennia. In the fifteenth century, however, an Italian patrician transformed aleatoric selection processes for political candidates into a system for the monetization of gambling. The Genoese Benedetto Gentile cleverly appropriated the giuoco del seminario, a mechanism of choice of candidates for the ‘membri dei Serenissimi Collegi’ and restaged it as a lottery game for the public: giuoco del lotto. In each case – political election and aleatoric game for personal profit –
the rule system was simply to pick 5 out of 90 available numbers. In the former case the chamber and the senate were selected, in the latter one the financial winners were determined by chance....