
Lottery Number Predictions
The game has long since become a mass phenomenon and an essential part of modern life. And although the lottery is becoming more and more popular, many people still see it as just a way of getting rich. It may not be free or reliable. On the other hand, as one of Jack London’s characters pointed out, in a game of chance, you can’t help but reckon with the facts – people sometimes get lucky. Lottery history is replete with surprising winnings, unexplained coincidences and instances of ingenuity on the part of players and game organisers. A few of them are worth getting to know, if only for the sake of curiosity.
Fortune’s favourites
A well-known “way” to get rich quick is by winning the instant lottery. As a rule, the chances of acquiring a lucky ticket are very slim. All the more incredible looks the story of Valerie Wilson, a New York grocery store worker who won the grand prize twice. In 2002 she won a million dollars in the Cool Million lottery with odds of 1:5,200,000. Four years later she won a second million by entering the Jubilee lottery. This time the odds of winning the lottery were 1 : 705,600. What were her chances of winning the top prize in both lotteries? Not difficult to calculate: 1 : (5,200,000 – 705,600) = 1 : 3,669,120,000,000, or roughly one in 3.7 trillion. The odds are really pathetically small, as you can see by imagining another lottery.
Let us assume that all the inhabitants of the Earth – 7 billion people – take part in it. The 3.7 trillion tickets with an erasable security layer issued on such an occasion, of which only one is a winner, are equally distributed among them. According to lottery rules in the regular weekly draw, each entrant uses one ticket. Of course, the first ticket opened may be the winning ticket. However in the worst case scenario the wait for the lucky ticket might take up to 10 years!
It should be said that in the history of American lotteries (of which there are many, and they take place constantly) there have only been a few cases with a second prize win in excess of a million dollars. However, all of them concerned regular lotteries, in which the jackpot is usually much larger than the grand prize in the instant lottery. It is also noteworthy that one of the biggest winnings – 254 million dollars – went in 2007 to an 84-year-old pensioner, whose last name was … Wilson. Don’t believe in coincidences.
And the record-breaker in the number of big winnings was Joan Ginter from Las Vegas. Over 17 years she has won four times in various lotteries – the last time in 2010 – and thus “earned” more than $20 million. According to the calculations, taking into account the chances of winning each time, such an achievement is only possible in one case out of 36 – 1024, or 36 septillion, against which even 3.7 trillion, or 3.7 – 1012 pales in comparison!
As an American professor of mathematics, an expert in the theory of probability, wittily and correctly pointed out on this occasion, the case is remarkable, but probability has no memory! And characteristically, the chances of Joan winning the next lottery are exactly the same as those of any other player. In other words, they are always there, albeit tiny. Such thoughts must occur to many lottery fans before they buy their next ticket (in fact, they are reassuring).
Are lottery organisers allowed to miscalculate? You won’t believe it, but it happens. The following story happened in an American state 20 years ago. Lotto 6 out of 44 scratch cards sold for $1 each, at a lottery prize pool of $27.9 million at the time, and almost all of it hit the jackpot.
Several investors thought they could make good money by buying and filling the cards with every possible combination of six out of the forty-four numbers. They considered the extra costs and risks (in particular, they worked out that in 120 of the previous draws there were no winners, in 40 there was one winner, and in 10 there were two winners) and assessed the profits. To implement the plan, 2.5 thousand small investors from different countries were recruited, as well as a group of people to work with the cards. In the end, due to lack of time, only 70% of the planned number of cards were used, but even that was enough to win the main prize. A bit of luck indeed!
So should you participate in lotteries in the hope of getting rich quick? Is it worth relying on chance in pursuit of easy money? Luck or no luck, that is the big question. Lotteries are regularly played by millions of people around the world and only a few win. But there is one thing that is certain – the organisers always win in any lottery.
There is no surefire strategy for guessing lotto numbers or finding your lucky ticket in an instant lottery game other than filling out all the cards or buying all the tickets. But this is only possible if players combine their efforts, and it only makes sense to do so if the prize pool is significantly larger than the value of all tickets, which it is not.
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