In 1997, I came up with this wonderful idea for picking numbers. Chart which numbers come up more frequently, and play them. Only problem is, 16 years later and I have not won a thing!
Then I heard about this guy on TV. He said he had a method that worked. And purportedly, he did win the lottery, several times in fact. He said, for example, don’t use the easy pick option, which sounds strange to me (don’t any random numbers have the same chance of coming up?).
Anyways, I could ask many questions about what method mathematically would work. But I will just ask one. The guy said always play the same numbers over and over again. Because, it is reasoned, they will have to come up eventually. Is that true? Play the same numbers over and over again? If, for example, I played different numbers each time, would that spoil my chances of winning for this reason? I’m confused. (This is of course a simple statistics question, in any event.)
Nope. Each time the numbers are pulled it is independent from the times before. If you had a 1 in 175,711,536 (odds of the NYS lotto) chance of winning one week, you would still have the same odds the next week because it’s not like they have to cycle through all possible combinations before repeating any.
Picking the same numbers over and over again will yield no advantage to randomly selecting new numbers each time.
Other than actually rigging the lottery ball blower thing (which has been attempted), there is no way to improve your odds of winning the lottery.
However, there is one catch. Most people tend to pick birthdays, and thus there are an inordinate amount of 1s through 31s that get picked, as compared to 32+. If you tend to play numbers only larger than 32, and you DO happen to win, you will be less likely to have to split your jackpot with anyone else. In a way, this will allow you to improve your winnings. But it won’t improve your chance of winning something.
Of course, even if the numbers were guaranteed not to be the same as any previous week, it would only guarantee that your numbers would come up sometime in the next 175,711,536 weeks – assuming the NYS lotto is still working the same way in 3381081 A.D.
Of course, even if the numbers were guaranteed not to be the same as any previous week, it would only guarantee that your numbers would come up sometime in the next 175,711,536 weeks – assuming the NYS lotto is still working the same way in 3381081 A.D.
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I have a winning system for lotteries where you can only buy numbers on tickets the vendor happens to have.
I insist on “beautiful” numbers – a quadruplet, or triplet and pair at a minimum. For example, 559895 wouldn’t be beautiful enough: it has a triplet and a pair, but the like digits aren’t consecutive.
The reason this is a winning system is that I might spend $20 a month on tickets if any numbers were good enough, but if no “beautiful” tickets show up I win the $20 I didn’t spend!
Unfortunately, my winning system didn’t actually work. The vendors remember me, spot me in the distance and yell out “Hey, Farang! Here’s a quadruple 7 I saved just for you!” At that point I have to buy the ticket; it would seem dishonest not to. :smack:
Worse, I’m afraid that if I do win the grand prize the award will be canceled! A decade ago, a gang rigged the lottery and got 113311 – their rigging method was to force 1’s and 3’s, but they couldn’t control the order. Now I’m afraid that if a quadruplet-7 does win, the government will suspect fraud and cancel the grand prize. :smack:
I did win the smallest prize once, coincidentally with an all 1’s and 3’s ticket: 131313. When I turned it in to a shop owner at 5% discount, I covered most of the number with my finger, exposing only the first 13. The guy patiently explained that it was the final two digits that were eligible for the small prize. So I uncovered the next two digits. “Can’t you understand Thai, you stupid Farang?” The ticket was only worth $30 or so; maybe I should have framed it (with its “beautiful” numbers ) instead.
This has been discussed before, but because those ***are ***the odds of the Powerball lottery (and since one ticket costs $2) ignoring taxes etc. once the jackpot reaches more than ~$350 million (like it did a week or so ago, $600+ million!) it would be an *almost *sure thing profit-wise if you played every possible combination (i.e. it would cost about $350 million dollars to buy all the combinations, so as long as the jackpot is higher you’d make a profit). Almost, because if you’re not the only winner (and with huge jackpots the odds increase that you won’t be) you’ll have to split it with one or more others, meaning that you’d ultimately lose money. The other factor is that even with an army of volunteers there is literally not enough time between drawings to purchase 175,711,536 tickets.
Anytime lottery odds and ‘systems’ come up I always just say, “Easy, just play the numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6”! Then when people incredulously say, “That’s crazy, what are the odds of those numbers coming up?!", I respond with, "Exactly, precisely, 100% the same as* any other six numbers coming up!***” Lottery numbers are not a dartboard, their ordinal relationship has zero effect on their selection potential.
I read that a large number of people DO use the 1,2,3,4,5,6 combo, so if they win they will have to split with many others. As was said before, numbers over 31 have a better chance of making a sole winner.
The lottery people love those who use the same numbers each time. Those gamblers feel that they ‘own’ the numbers and are afraid to not buy them in case they do come up. This means that they will continue to be long term customers even after they realise that their chances of winning are less than - err - winning the lottery.
Assuming that there is no trickery, rigging or a controlled flip… if you randomly flip a coin 9 times and it lands on heads all 9 in a row, most people will want to bet or at least believe their is an advantage by betting on heads again.
However the fact remains that the odds are still 50/50 (again removing the fact that some simple math involving rotation, angle and velocity really determine where it lands and therefore is never truly 50/50).
This is the reason casinos in Vegas installed the “last 20 numbers” displays at their roulette wheels. People are easy to influence and bet larger amounts when they think a color is “due.”
Regarding the “buy enough tickets so you’re guaranteed a win” strategy, didn’t that happen in some state lottery in the 90’s? I remember seeing some news story about it where some buy spent time figuring out which lotteries had the lowest number of options and then used a team to buy all the tickets.
There is a problem with playing the same numbers every week:
It sort of chains you to playing every week, and that’s a losing proposition.
Psychologically you are going to worry that the week you don’t play is the week that those numbers return some level of prize money.
I play when the prize gets better than the odds for a single winner, and I hear about it, and I’m near a store selling tickets. I’m too lazy to pick my own numbers (the best choices are the non-birthday numbers to better avoid sharing a prize) so I use a quick pick, which probably increases the chance that I’ll share a prize (though it doesn’t affect the odds of actually winning).
This seems to be one of the oldest questions about.
Does the logic of a number being “due” because it has not appeared for a while outweigh the idea that a number is more likely because it has come up a lot recently? It seems that many people carry the idea of a law of averages as a causative law - one that forces the future, rather than one that passively describes the past. Recognising this is a good place to start with the fallacy of predicting lottery numbers.
Indeed the next step would be to suggest that an imbalance in the frequency of the numbers suggest an inherent bias in the mechanism, and that you should always choose the more frequent numbers. Which is why casinos are very careful to avoid bias in their roulette wheels.
Which brings up the question of the tossed coin. If someone tossed a coin nine times and it came up heads every time, you would have to ask yourself the question - is this pure chance or is the damn coin a double header? At some point you might be convinced that it is indeed a double header, and thus be prepared to bet on yet another heads toss.
This of course brings up the standard carny swindle. Preying on your greed and pride, the carny make you believe that you have worked out his little scam, and lets you think you are smarter than he is, so you are quite puzzled that after an astounding run of all heads, the moment you bet $100 on another heads, it miraculously turns up tails. Usually of course this is the shell game, but the principle remains.
The lesson is that you need to understand your assumptions. What is it you assume about the nature of the game? Is it fair, biased, or fixed? How do you know? In a perfectly fair game you have, by definition, no way of predicting the next outcome. In a biased game there might be some statistical lean in the outcomes. But it might actually be fixed. A well designed fixed game is going to clean you out of your money faster than anything else, because it will be designed to prey upon human nature.
But at some point around there, you should start questioning the assumption that there’s no trickery, rigging, or control. Yes, it has a low prior probability, but that low prior probability must compete with the low probability of 9 unrigged heads.
) instead. 
I forgot about this way of beating the system!!! Curse you Little Nemo, my arch nemesis!