No. Next question?
To be fair, 1News does say the answer is “no”, in compliance with Betteridge’s Law of Headlines
So, with a spread of wins across MyLotto and in-store purchases this year, do online tickets or in-store ones have a higher chance of winning?
Lotto’s line on this is also straightforward: “Your chances of winning Lotto stay the same regardless of where you purchased your ticket.”
At the end of the story is this line: The Lotto draw is live on TVNZ1 at 8pm tonight.
Watching the Lotto draw should really be the answer to a lot of these questions. With scratch-and-win or computer draws you might hope there was a mistake in the programming or the distribution of cards, but with the lotto draw? Look at the balls tumbling in the transparent washing-machine thing. Do they look as if they know where you bought your ticket? Do they look as if they care?
Another way to look at this: suppose there genuinely was some way to get an edge in your Lotto chances and beat your neighbours. If you want secret advice like that, the web page of the country’s most popular news source is not going to be the place to find it.
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 »