Winning numbers vs Prizes

Hi, first of all congratulations on your deep analysis.

I made something similar on the Spanish Lotto may years ago but using a different approach.

I started asumming the game was fair and the lottery wasn’t rigged. Then I compared every winning combination (and sub-combinations of 3, 4 and 5 winning numbers) with the expected number of winners for the total bets on each game each week.

Using this method I confirmed a theory many people (myself included) has: that not all the players play their numbers "randomly" but that they have some "favourite numbers" and others that people just don’t like. Combos like 1-2-3-4-5 are played a lot, also date combinations — while numbers from 31 seem to be played less — leading to too-many-winners or no-winner scenarios in each case.

You can detect this by checking how many winners are in each prize category on each game, comparing with the expected statistical results (not only for the big prize but for the smaller ones also).

On the Spanish Lotto (a basic 6/49 lotto, with 1 in 14 million odds) sometimes you have no big prize winners even when there are 30 or 40 million bets (and there "should be" at least 1 or 2); sometimes you may have 10 or 20 winners with only 10-15 million bets (for an «easy» combo like 1-2-4-8-9-24 or 7-14-21-28-41-42).

People can select their own numbers or let the «machine» select it at the shop, those numbers are supposed to be random and doesn’t seem to influence on this (even if they are large).

If you read Spanish or can find a good translator you can find my (totally amateur) work here

http://www.microsiervos.com/archivo/azar/loto-un-sistema.html

— Alvy