Regardless of how you choose your numbers, the odds of winning the lottery are pretty low. It’s about one in 302 million, or about the same chance of getting struck by lightning. Despite those odds, lots of people still play the lottery. And with a massive jackpot on the line, there’s a lot of interest in how to pick your numbers.
The NYC Department of Education uses a lottery to assign students to schools but is reluctant to provide much information on how the lottery works or the odds of being assigned to different schools. By crowdsourcing data from families, I’m trying to shed some light on this opaque process.
While lottery statistics differ from game to game, it is often possible to identify patterns and trends by looking at the frequency of winning numbers. Some numbers, like “lucky” ones, tend to be winners more frequently than others. In a recent article, I used the New York State Lottery website to look at winning Powerball numbers since the change in format in 2015 from 59 white balls to 26 red Powerballs.
If a number wins more than once, it becomes a frequent winner and is more likely to continue winning in the future. That’s why it’s good to check out the frequency of winning numbers for the lottery you’re playing, as well as your own favorite numbers. That way you can be a informed player and avoid those numbers that seem to come up less often.