I work in the gambling industry and live in au. From my perspective this is super strange. By law vendors have to publish the odd (and on some games the EV).
Lotteries are required to publish the odds of matching x out of y numbers. Once the design is fixed, this figure does not change.
The expected dollar value of a winning ticket, on the other hand, changes every week depending on the number of tickets sold that week as well as the amount of any unclaimed jackpot(s) rolled over from previous weeks. I won't be surprised if state lotteries are not legally required to publish these figures every week. Nobody wants to be held responsible for a precise amount published on Tuesday when a snowstorm on Friday causes ticket sales to plummet.
Many states do publish estimates of the jackpot, of course, for advertising purposes. But they're only estimates, and I've never seen estimates of anything other than the jackpot. The Selbees took advantage of smaller winnings that usually go unnoticed.
I took his comment to mean that players doing the math isn't common. The operators know the odds and they publish those odds. Players often don't care what the odds actually mean (doing the math) and they'll play anyways.
