Poor Man's Penny Lottery

If you know how, you can play the Penny Lottery for free. Well, you have to cough up $25 to your local bank to get hold of a bank box of 2500 pennies, but that's the whole investment and if you don't like how it comes out, you can bring the unwanted coins back to the bank and cash them in for paper. How jolly. Poor Man's Penny Lottery can be played as a family game or as a game of insomniac solitaire. I typically can make about $300 or more per evening cash money, if I decide to sell the coins I find on eBay. Here's how the game is played:

First of all, open the bank box, revealing row upon row of assorted coins, some dark, some very bright and shiny, but shiny doesn't automatically mean it's a high-grade coin, no indeed. As you come into this game, you are ignorant of what it is you're looking for, and to really learn the game, you must learn what NOT to look for, to gain efficiency and fun-power.

You'll get a good handle on what's happening game-wise if you approach it from the viewpoint of coin search being a sort of Prosperity Path Magic-Find Quest.

If you do it for the money, you're bound to fail. Concentrate on the Thrill of the Chase. You'll follow the indicators (if you take my course, I teach how to do this) and you can use the game as an Augury or Fortune-Telling Game.

Keep in mind that it's not about money, it's about manipulating money with your hands and placing the money in the right categories. You have to remember 9 different factors and balance them in order to play the game correctly so you can win, and in this particular game, winning is measured in fun and U.S. dollars earned on eBay and in trunk-shows -- we'll talk details on my Coinology Course, which I'll offer soon, unless I get horribly busy again, as I did the past two weeks. I'll do my best to get it out to you soonest.

Okay, so apart from using it as a Luck-Meter and Karmic Biofeedback Device, what happens in the game?

Nothing.

That is, nothing happens by itself. Unless you take action, the coins just sit there in the flipping bank box, just like you left them.

Somehow, I expect more of you than that. What I'm describing is a game, sure, but it's deadly serious if you're in the same kind of deep financial straits everyone else in America is in right now except a few bank and oil executives, and I suspect they're shaking in their boots about the economic picture next year -- if the Mayan calendar is wrong.

Let's get right down to brass tacks. What you're essentially trying to do is to build several sets of Lincoln Memorials, but that's not what you're really doing; the set is a way of supporting the cost of the coin search -- which isn't much, but you might as well cover your costs and learn about the coin market at the same time, without fear of much hurt if something goes wrong on eBay, a slim chance of that, I'm told. Or was it a chance of being slimed?

There are risks when you sell anything, and especially when you sell on eBay -- eBay hates their small sellers and would like to get rid of them, so they side with the customer, favoring the large corporations, which build loss into their market plan. But the few eBay charge-backs you might get will be very small and mostly uncostly. Customers on eBay and Amazon will buy a coin set and then substitute crap coins for the good ones, then return it for a full refund, and paypal is owned by eBay, and it always takes the word of the customer, even if you prove they defrauded you. You have to take it on the chin; they win every time, and nobody can fight billion-dollar companies.

In Lincoln Memorial coin searches, all coins are in circulation. There is no reason to take in a coin that is less than a GEM BU. (See note below:)

There are notable exceptions to this ironclad rule.

I have no trouble finding what I need to make several collections, from "pocket change", meaning a box of in-circulation U.S. cents.

Because your coins are self-found, you aren't paying cash premiums for them, which means you can sell them cheaper than the guys who have to buy their coins at coin shows or from dealers or off eBay -- which is from you and your fellow eBay sellers.

There are Prize Catches of the Day.

Coins that are special are not part of the collections. They're where the big cash is. I have a few of my recent Prize Catches of the Day going up on my eBay account in the next few days -- you'll be amazed at what can be found in circulation currency!

I'll be publishing stuff related to this in a few days -- I've already made the game board and have gotten it back from the printer (too large for me to print it here).

One little hint for those who are already engaged in this pursuit with me:

Backup tubes of extra coins of every date and mint mark , so you don't feel forced to find an elusive coin this very night as is.

Don't store what you will never actually use. Make the decision now; don't handle a coin twice if you can help it.

You can tell by the back that a coin will be "good".

When you deal a hand, make a semi-circular pass over the felt. Don't be afraid to get no good coins in a hand, but it's seldom I don't get at least one goodie for every 20 coin hand I deal.

Let yourself find nothing of high value. Some bank boxes are like that, and some nights are just like that, too.

You can't be looking for Mint Errors and win -- you're building set inventory and once in a while, you'll get lucky with a 70-s small date or a 1995-d doubled die.

If you know what you're looking for, and you have a good handle on the "feel" of the coins, you will have fun, sort coins, build a set or two, being Vigilant Always.

At some point, the collections will improve, based on your knowledge and feel. There is no substitute for Experience Personally Experienced. I have spoken.