Probabilities, Averaging…And Winning The Lottery!
Okay, I want to start this article with a simple thought experiment.
Imagine you are walking along a country road in the spring. The sun is shining brightly, and amongst the gentle swaying of the trees you hear the sounds of birds singing. It’s a beautiful day, and in your pocket you have two shiny dollar coins jingling away happily.
Out of nowhere, a truck trundles noisily towards you. In the back of this truck you can just make out the unmistakable shapes and colors of crisp, clean one hundred dollar bills – a lot of them! The truck comes to a stop beside you and a friendly fellow jumps out and shakes your hand.
‘Hello there,’ he says jovially, with a wide smile on his face. ’I have a proposition for you. For the two one-dollar coins I hear clinking sweetly in your pocket, I will give you a chance to win all the money in the back of this truck. All you need to do is guess exactly the number I have written down on a piece of paper in my coat pocket. This number is between one and fifty-five million. If you guess this number, you can drive this truck home with all the money contained within it!’
What would you do?
On the face of it, the proposition sounds ludicrous – after all, what chance do you have of actually guessing a number between one and fifty-five million? However, if you are like me (and, like literally hundreds of millions of others around the world), you take out your money, hand it over, cross your fingers…and give it your best shot!!!
This, of course, is the essence of how lotteries work around the world. They offer the chance to win extraordinarily large amounts of money for a relatively small investment. And despite the astronomical odds against you actually winning the lottery, the combination of the small amount to play and the lure of financial freedom often proves irresistible!
Lotteries are popular because they are purely a game of chance – skill plays no part in the draw whatsoever, and the person filling out their entry coupon next to you has just as great a chance of winning as you, and the person next in line. According to the pure mathematics of the odds, no number selection has any greater or lesser chance of winning than any other.
So, as you watch the noisy truck disappearing into the distance, and you slap you pocket wistfully where your two dollars had been just moments ago, you wonder if there could be any possible way to shorten the odds of winning the lottery & driving home that truckload of cash?
The answer, of course, is no – the odds of winning the lottery are determined by the number of balls within each lottery, and the number of matches required to win the jackpot. As long as each draw is fair & transparent, the odds remain the odds, no matter what.
What you CAN do, however, is introduce some proven mathematical techniques to your number selection – namely Probabilities, and Averaging.
You see, there’s a funny thing about numbers. If you repeatedly draw a specific quantity of numbers from a given range, using exactly the same process, the number of times each number is drawn tends to ‘average out’ – that means that the longer the process is repeated, the more likely it is that the number of times each ball drops will fall into line with every other ball. This, of course, is the essence of number averaging.
We can then introduce some of the basic concepts of Probabilities to even further refine our number selection process. If you can remember your basic math, probabilities measure the likelihood of a given event occuring. To demonstrate the difference between odds and probabilities, lets take a roulette wheel. The chance of getting the number 15 is one in thirty-seven (assuming just one ‘zero’ on the wheel). However, we know that at some point – either sooner or later – the number 15 IS going to be drawn, so for each spin that the number 15 is NOT drawn, the probability that it will be drawn next spin goes up slightly. The longer the period where 15 has not been drawn – the higher the probability that it will be drawn next time round. Now you can understand why so many players carefully record previously drawn numbers!
This can be easily applied to your friendly neighborhood lottery. It is very easy to get number histories for lottery draws – many of them are available online. By carefully studying these histories, it is possible to create smaller subsets of numbers that are more likely to be drawn than others. Similarly, it is possible to create subsets of numbers that are less likely to be drawn, as they may have been recently drawn at a much higher rate than other numbers.
Of course, this is no ‘magic bullet’ that will enable you to scoop the next jackpot! However, if you are able to interpret the the histories correctly and select your number subsets, then you are now using powerful mathematics to at least give you a higher probability of drawing numbers – rather than just picking numbers randomly like every other schmo!
