Have My Lottery Numbers Ever Won the Lottery?

Did my lottery number ever win? Have the numbers I’ve been playing ever come up before?

It’s a good question, with some interesting answers.

Here’s my take.

How To Find Out If Your Numbers Have Ever Won

To find out if your numbers have ever won before we need to check them against the past results. This can be either really easy or damn difficult. It depends how helpful your lottery company is!

State Lottery Website Tools

If your lottery company has a good website with some decent results pages on it, there’s a small chance it will also have a “have my numbers ever won” tool. If it does, then you can just enter your numbers and it will tell you instantly if those numbers have ever come up before.

The Delaware State Lottery for example have just such a feature – even if it’s not your state you can still use it for Mega Millions (and Powerball) as it’s the same game all over the US. It will even let you choose the date range and the minimum number of matches to report. Then it tells you which draws/dates your numbers came up.

Let’s be realistic though, most lottery companies won’t have such a nice tool (Delaware for the win!).

So Plan B is to DIY it.

Checking The Results History

OK, you could do this manually by just browsing through the results history. But with hundreds of results this quickly gets painful. And there is a strong chance of making a mistake and not spotting numbers that did win.

So I’ve put together a spreadsheet to help you do it.

Please let me know in the comments below if you find this useful, what’s good about it and/or how it could be better?

It’s pretty easy to use, but you will of course need a list of previous results to check against (you may be able to download a file from your lottery company website – if not, ask them for one). Copy and Paste the historical results in on the left under section 1 where it says ‘[1] Add past results for the game here:’. Then enter your numbers to check under ‘[2] Enter your numbers to check here:’. It will then report all the matches.

Notes:

1. There is some example data in there just so you can see how it works.
2. This spreadsheet has been set up for Powerball (i.e. 5 main numbers plus one Powerball number), but you can of course adjust it for whatever game type you need. Just add or remove columns and adjust the formulas.
3. Just copy the formula columns (columns H to O) down to as many rows as you need for the results you have.

If you’re not a spreadsheet person and don’t know how to adjust columns/formulas etc, add a comment with the game type you need and if I get enough requests I’ll create a custom version.

Should You Care If Your Numbers Have or Haven’t Been Drawn?

There’s no particular reason to care if your numbers have (or haven’t) been drawn before. But it is interesting to find out.

Some people believe that once combinations have been drawn that they are now somehow less likely to be drawn again. That’s not the case.

If you think of flipping a coin. If you get ‘tails’ this time and toss the coin again – ‘tails’ is not suddenly less likely this time because it came up before.

It can seem this way with the lottery (see are winning lottery numbers repeated?) but you have to remember just how many possible results we’re dealing with. The chances of any single combination coming up are small, whether or not they came up before.

Going back to the coin – it is possible that ‘tails’ is less likely. Because of the way the coin has been made, or the way you’re flipping the coin. And a similar principle can apply to lottery games too, but that’s a whole essay of it’s own.