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
What I’m not seeing in these comments is anything about the selection frequency among other lottery players.
If you want to avoid a split with another player, and granting the even distribution of number choices, pick something others aren’t likely to select. That is NOT evenly distributed among the possible choices. The last number played has a label, which makes it something people might choose based on that fact. 1-2-3-4-5-6 would be a bad one, etc.
That said, pick numbers that would be really cool to win with, as everyone else has said, it doesn’t really matter!
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