Posted on 01/13/2016 8:47:25 PM PST by Callahan
This means there should be about 574 million tickets purchased. Dividing that by the odds for each winning combination, and subtracting that from the actual winners, gives these excess winners:
There were about 375,000 (-2.5%) less Powerball only matches that what would be expected.
These figures use the Winners column, ignoring the Power Play figures.
So why are there these extra winners? I read of a lottery that had 15 winners and it was traced back to numbers on fortune cookies. What is it about the winning numbers that would make people pick them more than the normal odds?
I'd say it's because only the selected number 34 was more than 31. Especially the Powerball was 31 or less. The other numbers were 4, 8, 19, and 27 with a Powerball of 10. These number could all be used to make birthdays or some part of birthdays. A parent who bet their kids birthdays of 4/19, 8/27, and a Powerball of 10, would win $50,000. Since people tend to bet important numbers in their lives like birthdays, that would lead to excess winners in this case.
The number of Powerball only winners is lower because these lower numbers would match easier with the Powerball.
The total payout of these extra winners was about $36 million, which is an extra 20% of the expected amount.
Ten was just an unpopular powerball number. Weird things like that are common in these matters. I think it is crazy that no one won the top price on Saturday. They purposely made it harder. Oh well. Lots of winners in lots of categories. It’s all fun.
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