Posted on 12/02/2020 11:10:57 AM PST by mylife
An unusual sequence of numbers drawn in South Africa's national lottery has sparked accusations of fraud after 20 people won a share of the jackpot.
Tuesday's PowerBall lottery saw the numbers five, six, seven, eight and nine drawn, while the PowerBall itself was, you have guessed it, 10.
The organisers say the sequence is often picked. But some have alleged a scam and an investigation is under way.
It is extremely rare for multiple winners to share the jackpot.
The organisers said 20 people purchased a winning ticket and won 5.7m rand ($370,000; £278,000) each.
Another 79 ticketholders won 6,283 rand each for guessing the sequence from five up to nine but missing the PowerBall.
What do lottery winners spend their money on? The chances of winning South Africa's PowerBall lottery are one in 42,375,200 - the number of different combinations when selecting five balls from a set of 50, plus an additional bonus ball from a pool of 20.
The odds of the draw resulting in the numbers seen in Tuesday's televised live event are the same as any other combination. Competitions resulting in multiple winners are rare, but this may have something to do with this particular sequence.
"Congratulations to tonight's 20 winners of the PowerBall draw," lottery operator Ithuba tweeted, adding: "These numbers may be unexpected, but we see many players opt to play these sequences."
(Excerpt) Read more at bbc.com ...
A few random things about lotteries
There is “bias”, which is to say that certain balls in a given set do come up more frequently than others. State lotteries use different ball sets in some rotation and each has different distributions.
Some lotteries post the pre-draw test draws results ... data is data when it comes to determining bias.
Wheels constructed by what a ball set has done in the past are going to seem better than they actually are, even if you are using many, many draws for your data.
Spreadsheet programs can be formatted to import past lottery draw data.
Machines tend to not stir adequately so “pairs” separated by one or two numbers are common.
While any given draw can have any distribution, over time lottery picks will fall within a distribution of cumulative value ... so avoiding lottery tickets with very low or very high cumulative value can pay off.
Powerballs break up 6-draw lotteries and prevent wheels based on pairs of triplets.
The add a buck tickets actually improve the chance of winning small, which will over time reduce how much you will actually lose ... which is to say you’ll go broke just the same but it might not seem that way because you’ll be winning smalls while still losing your shirt.
Plan on losing money. If you ever win big avoid falling off of beds, 2” deep ponds and overcast skies that might possibly produce lightning. If you win big twice or more I would suggest just give up and live in a bubble wrap outfit, in a bubble wrap house and away from where planes fly overhead.
The more triplets or pairs the more numbers you have represented BUT the more you have in a wheel the more often these will absorb numbers actually picked without an win. Combined with the increasing cost of playing a wheel favors smaller wheels with fewer triplets or pairs.
A 5 triplet wheel (representing 15 numbers), paying the extra buck, will cost $20 to play each time for 10 tickets.
Pair wheels are better when it comes to not absorbing numbers futilely but cost a lot more for the number of numbers represented by the wheel. A 5 pair wheel (representing just 10 numbers) uses 10 tickets. A 6 pair wheel representing 12 numbers has 20 tickets.
The best wheel I ever designed still would have lost 73% since 2013 of what I might have paid in had I been buying, or about $33K to $34K in the hole. That performance was only possible because of the $2 ticket. The standard $1 ticket would have lost more than 90% of half as much ... still more than $20K in the hole.
You may notice that those add a buck tickets don’t actually help you win, I’d have gifted the government an extra $13-14 thousand just for the privilege of “winning” more smalls.
The organizers say the sequence is often picked.
The chances of winning South Africa’s PowerBall lottery are one in 42,375,200
I don’t see a problem here. Maybe they should be put in charge of elections
About “winning” percentages, I’ve recently posted higher numbers for that wheel but that was for the last 180 days only, not the last 7 years.
More seriously, I've heard that if you insist on paying the "bad at math" tax, pick numbers above 31 so you don't have to share with people who pick birthdays for their numbers.
I remember back in the 70s, in Pennsylvania (of all places), the daily lotto came up 666. It was investigated and found out officials put a little mercury in the other balls to fix the outcome. State made mucho $$$ since it was the lowest chosen set. They were to make a movie but I don’t believe they did.
I read some time ago that the combination 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, was played by a HUGE number of people every game (Powerball or Megamillions, can’t recall). The number was so large that it was projected that the game would be bankrupt if the combination actually came up.
So people love to play numbers that they like, and some combinations are liked by a lot of people.
“HP was a powerhouse.”
WAS is the key word here...
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