Lottery Statistics - That’s the Rest of the Story
In the last post, Picking Lottery Numbers - When Your HOT; Your HOT , you discovered that the Hottest numbers occurred more than twice as often as the Coldest number. For many people this is inexplicable and hard to swallow. It shakes the foundation of their belief that the lottery is a Random game of chance. But, they created their own quandary because of their limited knowledge of mathematics. They really only have part of the story. So, let’s pull a Paul Harvey and give them the rest of the story.
Our skeptics belief that all numbers should occur essentially the same number of times is correct. But, here’s the caveat. This is true for any lottery in the long run; after millions and millions of drawings. So, it’s going to take millions and millions of drawings before our skeptics will be able to prove that they were right. Perhaps a skeptic’s time would be better spent being skeptical about living that long.
There are two points that I want to make here that are very exciting:
First, mathematics predicts the wide fluctuations that occur early on in a random process. The fact that some numbers have occurred twice as often (or even more) at the beginning of a lottery is not unusual. In fact, it is expected!
Second, and the most exciting, in the random game we call the lottery, the short term is YOUR LIFETIME!!! Here’s what I mean. If you play a lottery with 2 drawings per week, in 50 years you would have played a little over 5,000 drawings. Great! Fantastic! Why? Because, 5,000 lottery drawings is nothing compared to the millions of drawings necessary before all number will have occurred essentially the same number of times.
Lottery Statistics show that the Lottery Number Patterns we see are not only real, they are expected. We can use Lottery Software to identify them and use them to our advantage or not. So, for all the sayers, nayers and players; that’s the rest of the story.
