Pretty sure the "father" knows exactly what the expected monetary value of those is. They just choose to value the excitement higher. Which is probably why a large portion of the players do it.
Also IQ is not intelligence. I'm seeing more and more posts from people who talk about IQ like it's their real-life INT stat. Is this just an American thing? Do people use the terms interchangeably or are you guys all doing IQ tests regularly and ranking yourselves by how good you are at puzzles?
It's late for me, so maybe I'm not getting your joke. I was implying that intelligence was used for the math degree and lack of wisdom in buying scratchers. I was also trying to reference an oft quoted DnD Stat meme;
Strength is being able to crush a tomato
Dexterity is being able to dodge a tomato
Constitution is being able to eat a bad tomato
Intelligence is knowing a tomato is a fruit
Wisdom is knowing not to put a tomato in a fruit salad
Charisma is being able to sell a tomato based fruit salad
There are good doctors who smoke cigarettes, there are people who are good at math and still play lottery, it's the same. They know it's not good for you, but can't help it anyway.
To expand on that, people can be smart in one aspect and really fucking dumb in others. Intelligence is a spectrum, it's not binary like you're either smart or dumb. Plenty of people who understand quantum level physics etc. who are socially and emotionally at the level of children and vice versa and so on.