Probability and the Lottery
May 26th, 2004 | Math, Probability, Statistics
The other night on the news there was a story about a local man who has a “sure-fire” system for winning the lottery. (Unfortunately I can’t find a link to the story) Basically his method was to study the numbers that have come up in past drawings and use this combined with some other techniques to figure out what numbers were more likely to be drawn. Using this method he won a little over a million dollars a few years ago.
And of course the piece also featured a statistics professor from school talking about how this strategy wasn’t going to make anyone rich. She had all of the usual arguments and randomness and probability which of course were glossed over because they don’t make as good of a news story as someone who has found a way to “beat” the system.
But the professor did have one great line that I really liked. It was something like: “The best that these systems can do is lower your probability of losing.” I chuckled when I heard that because if the odds are 40 million to 1 of winning, that means that lowering you odds of losing by a little bit means that the odds of winning the money is still several million (probably 39,999,999) to 1.
So I had to laugh a little bit on that one. I wondered how many people who saw that story went out and picked up one of the many books about lotto strategies that the story featured. But the one question the piece never asked is:“If these systems work so well, how come there aren’t more millionaires?”