[festusbanjo]

All I ever needed to know about statistics is summed up thusly; If you flip a coin 9 times and it comes up heads each time, what are the odds of the tenth flip showing up as heads...still 50%. I have read articles about people using the lottery commission websites to look at public information about the number of scratch off tickets issued and already sold for each game, how many of the top prizes had been won, and then extrapolating the best odds of winning and purchasing tickets for the games with the best chance to still win a major prize.

[fortheDeclaration]

If you flip a coin 9 times and it comes up heads each time, what are the odds of the tenth flip showing up as heads...still 50%.

Exactly.

The gambler fallacy is that somehow the next event will be influenced by the last.

Stats are history, not prophecy.

[discostu]

There’s a difference between scratcher tickets and coin flips though. Coin flips are independent events, what’s happened in the past has no impact on the future. Scratcher tickets are a predetermined quantity randomly sorted, they put out so many winners of each value and bury them among so many losers. It’s more like dealing with a deck of cards, if you flip 9 cards out a deck without putting them back if all of them are black your odds that #10 will be black have been greatly reduced.