The Friday Raffle

One of the best moments of my life was the day I won the raffle harder than anyone ever had. Third grade, Mr Baltz’s class, had a weekly tradition known as the Friday Raffle. Throughout the week, many kids would bring in toys and other such items and promptly have them confiscated. All confiscated items went directly to the raffle table, to wait for the end of the week. If one did something worthy of praise, he or she would receive a raffle ticket with their name on it. Your name is drawn, you choose an item to win. You could put in as many raffle tickets as you desired to increase your chances of winning, but most third-graders didn’t know the ins and outs of the raffle well enough to make choices like that.
I had never thought myself very lucky, and had gone through numerous trials looking for the most efficient way to win. Three week’s worth of tickets went into this next one, I had decided the only way was to put everything on the line. My friends had been curious, but too impatient to make the same sacrifices. My efforts had resulted in eight tickets, which went to the drawing bowl with hope. There were to be ten drawings total, and it was about time I reclaimed that rubber band ball that had been taken weeks ago.
I had won once before, but never before had I won twice in a row. That was my goal. The drawing started with two other kids, and then me four times in a row! As a chorus of angels started playing, I decided two out of four times to choose something that used to belong to one of my friends, making sure they owed me in case another experiment required favors. I had taken my pick, and was thinking that it could get no better than this. My friend Lukas won back his Pokemon cards on the next draw, and I bathed in my success almost ignoring the next few draws. To my unending surprise, the last three belonged to me! I was ecstatic, and though I never won a single time afterward, I had truly found the ultimate technique for recovering lost personal items.
This might be fairly obvious now, but to eight year olds this was revolutionary information. From that point on, everyone was trying it. Not a single attempt by others payed as tremendous dividends as my own had. My one in a million win was at that point declared a fluke, though saving tickets was passed on as the best method by far for generations to come. Probably.