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
Exactly. People confuse “what are the chances of the lottery numbers being the same twice” with “given a winning set of numbers, what are the chances the next draw will be the same.”
One way that helped me explain it, is let’s say I asked what the odds are of the winning numbers being 1,4,18,19,23,28,29? Is that arrangement more likely than any other? The answer should be no, but those numbers are literally the last winning numbers for lotto max. I used a lottery to develop the question, and it didn’t affect the probability. Sometimes new information changes a probability, sometimes it doesn’t. In this case it doesn’t.
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