August 16, 2014

Lotto and concrete implementation

There are lots of Lotto strategies based on trying to find patterns in numbers.

Lotto New Zealand televises its draws, and you can find some of them on YouTube.

If you have a strategy for numerological patterns in the Lotto draws, it might be a good idea to watch a few Lotto draws and ask yourself how the machine knows to follow your pattern.

If you’re just doing it for entertainment, go in good health.

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Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »

Comments

  • avatar
    Sammie Jia

    Lol, actually i have an unproved strategy…

    buy the same combinations of numbers every week, the wining chance should be larger then changing the numbers every week…

    i remember last year, a maori trust won the first prize. their strategy was buying the same combination of number every week for a very long time…and they won. interestingly, they bought 10 times the same set of combinations… I remember the first prize of won by 13 tickets, where 10 belonged to the same owner…

    10 years ago

    • avatar
      Martin Kealey

      So that guy spends 10x as much on tickets all the same, so that he can win triple the amount (or to be precise, by a factor of 3.077); sure, that sounds like a great strategy.

      As for “buy the same combinations of numbers every week, the wining [sic] chance should be larger then [sic] changing the numbers every week”, there’s nothing polite that can be said about such nonsense.

      If you really believe that works, can you please explain how the lotto machine knows which numbers were drawn previous (presumably so it can reduce the likelihood of drawing them)?

      And the other thing: let’s assume, in a fit of utter fantasy, that some “system” actually works. How long is it going to be before everyone knows this “system”? And then what is the average winning prize going to be when everyone bets on the same numbers? Remember: the prize pool is about half of the money spent to purchase the tickets for the same draw…

      10 years ago

  • avatar
    Martin Kealey

    The television broadcast is not “authoritative”; the authoritative draw is whatever is observed by the official observers. If you think there has been some fraud, you could go to Wellington and ask to see their certified results.

    10 years ago