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Ideas/Section-10
It is very tempting to
play the lottery. Just last week, there was a
lottery in my area that had a grand prize of $110 Million! What
you could
do with all that money! Unfortunately, the odds of winning that
prize were
1 in 54.9 Million. In other words, you'd be more likely to get hit
by
lightning or die in a plane crash than win. So, it's really a sucker
bet.
But, still, it's fun to play.
Lots of people use "systems"
to try to win. They use birthdays, or they
keep track of which numbers have already been picked, or any of
the other
systems out there. Well, the bad news is, NONE of them work. There
is NO
way one can accurately predict which numbers will come up in a random
drawing.
Let's look at the most common way to "predict"
lottery numbers. This would
be tracking. People have kept track of lottery numbers for years,
trying to
establish a "pattern." Either they are looking for which
numbers come up
more often, or which have been neglected. They use this information
as a
basis for the numbers they pick. This just doesn't work, though.
With the number of balls in a state lottery
(usually 40 - 45), there are
just too many different combinations of numbers to be able to predict
which
will come up, based on past performance. Sure, the "law of
averages" would
say that the number 9 should come up soon, since it hasn't been
picked for 6
months. However, you can't say when the 9 will come up. You will
probably
find that 10 to 12 of the numbers haven't been picked in some time.
This is
NOT a pattern, this is randomness. The other numbers will eventually
be
picked, but not all at once.
Playing by birthdays, addresses, or lucky
numbers is the same. The idea is
that if you always play the same numbers, they will eventually come
up. In
theory, this is true. You may have to wait a few hundred, or even
thousand,
years, though, because of the shear number of combinations possible.
If you play the lottery consistently, you
are bound to win SOMETHING, even
if it's a little prize. This gives some people the misguided notion
that
their system works. Actually, they were just lucky. If you look
at the
statistics for those who win the lottery, you will find that most
of them
let the computer pick their numbers. They play randomly
