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!
Did it hit anyone else as hard:
Winning the lotto is THE SAME odds as the numbers repeating… ouch.
Yes it’s true.
It’s because the numbers (balls, whatever) have no memory.
Every draw is a complete reset, and what came in the weeks/months/years before have zero impact whatsoever.
But people can’t / won’t comprehend this.
[In 2009 the Bulgarian lottery had the same numbers in two draws, 5 days apart](https://gizmodo.com/why-the-exact-same-lottery-numbers-came-up-twice-in-one-1515565938)
Old joke about the professor who always carried a bomb when flying, because the probability of there being two on the same flight were so small…
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.
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.
You flip a coin. It’s heads. Now what are the odds that heads also appears on the second flip? on the third? fourth? no matter how many times you flip the coin, there is always a 50% chance it lands on heads. It’s exactly the same concept with lotto numbers, but instead of 2 possible outcomes, there are hundreds of millions.
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