Lottery Tips - What’s Our Anniversary, Honey?
In the last post, Lottery Tips - Happy Birthday , we talked about lottery players who use dates and anniversaries to pick their lottery numbers. This means that their wagers will only contain numbers between 1 and 31. This is fine for the Wisconsin 5/31 drawing but not so fine for the Rhode Island 5/35 lottery because 4 numbers, 32 thru 35, are never played. As the size of the lottery goes up, playing birthdays and anniversaries gets less and less attractive.
Now, I’ve known this for years but never seriously investigated it. But, something I said in the last post has been gnawing at me. To review, I said that for the NJ540 lottery, 23% of the winning jackpot numbers contained only numbers less than or equal to 31. A true statement. But, it was like that scab that you can’t stop picking at. I just couldn’t leave it alone.
What bothered me was the assumption that analyzing the NY559 and the NJ540 was adequate; sufficient. I hate it when others paint everything with a broad brush based upon a single example. So, I analyzed them all. At least, all of the 5 number lotteries and put the results in a graph which is shown below.
Now I feel better. And, I learned something. Notice that for the 5/35 lotteries, 40% to 50% of the time you couldn’t win the jackpot by singing Happy Birthday. This occurred by adding only 4 more numbers to the game; 32 thru 35! So, for all you movie goers out there, in 20 to 25 weeks of lottery drawings out of every year, The Wedding Singer’s chances of Winning the Lottery jackpot were zero. That’s a pretty stiff price to pay.
