Numbers Fun Part 3
In parts 1 and 2 of this series we discussed “summing” lottery picks and “oddities” that arise when comparing the sums of the winning numbers drawn in the Powerball lottery.
Part 3 deals with trends and the golden rule of playing the lottery, “The trend is your friend”.
If you ask a mathematician about playing the lottery, you might be told that the lottery is a tax on people that are bad at math.
You would likely be told that from a mathmatical point of view that every lottery drawing is unique unto itself, that every number that can be drawn has equal odds of being drawn and that there is little if anything one can do to increase their odds of winning the lottery.
And the mathematician would be absolutely right, if the lottery numbers were drawn with zero bias and one evaluated the lottery results over a sufficiently large number of draws.
In real life and with real lotteries, whose winning numbers are determined by mechanical means, the mathematician would be wrong as some of the theories in which mathematicians are schooled and which they strongly endorse simply do not hold up very well in a real life mechanically drawn lottery.
To demonstrate that claim let’s use the Powerball lottery as an example.
On 08/28/2005 the Powerball lottery was reconfigured, increasing the count of white balls from 53 to 55, which is the current configuration.
For reference consider the time frame from 08/28/2005 through 10/25/2008. During this time frame a total of 330 Powerball drawings took place.
During this period the numbers:
12, 43 and 48 were each drawn a total of 38 times or 11.5%.
13 and 40 were each drawn a total of 37 times or 11.2%
2,19 and 30 were each drawn a total of 36 times or 10.9%
42 and 54 were each drawn a total of 35 times or 10.6%
14, 24, 26, 47, and 55 were each drawn a total of 34 times or 10.3%
At the other end of the spectrum the numbers:
11 and 46 were each drawn 25 times or 7.6%
25 was drawn 24 times or 7.3%
4 and 29 were each drawn 23 times each or 7.0%
33 and 44 were each drawn 21 times each or 6.4%
6 was drawn 20 times or 6.1%
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