So a co-worker was talking about someone’s stupid plan to always play the previous winning lotto numbers. I chimed in that I was pretty sure that didn’t actually hurt their odds. They thought I was crazy, pointing out that probably no lottery ever rolled the same five-six winning numbers twice in a row.
I seem to remember that I am correct, any sequence of numbers has the same odds. But I was totally unable to articulate how that could be. Can someone help me out? It does really seem like the person using this method would be at a serious disadvantage.
Edit: I get it, and I’m not gonna think about balls anymore today.
In: Mathematics
That’s actually a good argument against playing the lottery at all.
You intuitively would not play the old lottery numbers as the odds seems astronomically low. You would also not play 1 1 1 1 1 1 1, as that too, seems very improbable.
Well, then the same reasoning applies to all numbers: it is very unlikely that you win any specific number. So: is very stupid to play the lottery.
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