Or in other words 1 in 175,711,536. Which is also the odds of winning Mega Millions of course. (Because the quick pick machine is really just doing it’s own mini lottery draw to produce your ticket).

You see, it’s only us humans who place any significance in numbers being in sequential order (or multiples of another number, or all evens or odds etc etc). To a computer, they’re just different symbols. They could just as well be shapes, or colors.

It looks and feels really significant, but mathematically it really isn’t. Weird huh.

The numbers are just markings on the balls. There is no reason that any particular combination of balls should be any less likely than any other. What if the balls were just different colours instead of numbers? See what I mean?

The closest I’ve seen to a straight was on May 6, 1989. The Arizona Lotto ‘The Pick’, a 6/44 lotto, had the following draw: 1,2,3,4,5,17. That’s pretty close.

However, even if it had ben 1,2,3,4,5,6, it would have been extremely rare, and I believe playing those numbers is less likely to give me a 4 or 5 out of 6 on a regular basis. Therefore, it’s not a combination I would play.

For me, it makes sense to eliminate some of the combinations, not because they are impossible, but because they are less likely to happen tomorrow. For example, in a Lotto 6/44 you get six numbers drawn. One of those numbers will be the lowest, and one the highest. The others will be somewhere in between. I’m not talking about the order of the draw, just about arranging the numbers from lowest to highest, giving you 6 positions. Now in the previously mentioned Arizona Lotto ‘The Pick’, the lowest high number since 11/2/1988 (I don’t go further back because the previous numbers are not sorted from low to high) was 13. Therefore, while 6 – 12 could, in theory, appear as the high numbers, the history tells me they are less likely to appear in that position tomorrow. Of course I would still play those numbers for a lower position, just not the highest position. Likewise, during that same period, the highest low number was 29. It seams to me unlikely that a number higher than that would appear, in the lowest position, tomorrow, though not impossible. Therefore, I would not play a number larger than 29 in the low position.

Does my logic make any sense Lottery-Guy?

What is an abnormal number of draws for a number not to appear? 30+? What about 20..? Then you have a rule for if it hits, it will hit again. But it’s only ‘likely’ and within a ‘few’ draws. But it’s ‘likely’ that any number will appear within a ‘few’ draws.

If you’re only looking for something on occasions where you’ve determined it’s significant, then sometimes you’ll see the result you’re looking for. And where you don’t see it, you’ve got another rule to fall back on! (It’s the infrequency illusion)

I agree your approach is not less successful than using random numbers, but it’s no better either.

Also, look at most of your Pick 5 lotteries. How many times do you see numbers that repeated in the previous drawing or skip one drawing? Lots.

I know you belittle “pretty patterns” as a means to hit the lottery and suggest that the same chance of success can be achieved playing random numbers, but I can assure you identifying abnormal variances or occurrences is not less successful than choosing random number. After all, your random picks may happen to follow another’s pretty pattern pick. To each his own.

So you’re just back to randomness again.