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
Consider your co-worker’s observation that “probably no lottery ever rolled the same five-six winning numbers twice in a row.” Even if that were true, you have to keep in mind how many number combinations have never happened in the history of lotteries.
Look at New York’s Lotto, for example. This lottery picks six numbers out of 59, for a total of 32 billion possible combinations. It’s been around since 1967, and draws numbers twice a week. So they’ve had just under 6,000 drawings to date. Subtract 6,000 from 32 billion, and you’ll see that there are roughly 32 billion combinations that have never been drawn. From a statistical perspective, almost none of the things that could happen in the lottery have ever actually happened.
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