It was very helpful to know what beer were on draft during the Pub Crawl.

Sean

In 2010 I was living on Hanover St and woke up in the middle of the night (about 1:00am) after a few hours sleep, took a look at beeradvocate, and saw that a ton of people who were in town just for Kate Day were already lining up for bottles. Since I was just down the street I went and joined them–waited from 1:30am to 6:30am in freezing rain to get my calendar page before I went back home and to bed.

A lot of people who lined up after 5am didn’t get calendar pages and no bottles. It was fun meeting people there but the weather was brutal and it sucked. A lot of people were upset that they didn’t get any because so many people basically camped out (including myself, of course, but I lived right there and felt entitled;-). In my opinion, the people who wanted them the most got bottles, but all in all the system wasn’t working anymore. The scratch tickets are much better, and I love that all funds go to local charities.

That said, I could tell on many of the 30 tickets my wife and I purchased just by looking at them if they were winners or not (we won on five of them). But it wasn’t because of the upper left showing. Most had very tiny, almost microscopic nicks where “You Win” or “Try Again” shows up. If red was showing through I knew it wasn’t a winner. I don’t think there was any kind of grand conspiracy to stack the decks, I think the tickets just could have been made better. The silver layer really wasn’t very thick and it wouldn’t have taken much to cause the nicks.

I wouldn’t have been happy if I got skunked, but I would have chalked it up to at least supporting the local community.

At any rate, I’m ranting here now, lol. Cannot wait for Monday! Kate Day is always a holiday for me–third year in a row I’m using a vacation day to go. See you there Brian!

I stated I didn’t get one. That wasn’t the point. I mentioned how many winners I got to juxtapose that with the blatant differences between winning tickets and losing tickets before scratching. It is human nature to be upset at a situation where expectations (to get a bottle or two of Kate the Great) aren’t met. I only mentioned shuffling as a joke (tone is difficult to convey in type sometimes).

One could say that the system they used was truly random as opposed to a more calculated random, and that led to the blocks of winners and losers. It’s hard to not be cynical though when you can see very clearly in the picture posted that one can detect a winner from a loser before scratching very easily.