I hear the claims that the VA Lottery draws may not be fair, so I decided to do a little test. I did this work by hand and the results have not been double-checked by anyone else, but here's what I got. By far and away, the most popular numbers in the Virginia Pick 3 Lottery are the so-called "triples;" 000, 111, 222, 333, 444, 555, 666, 777, 888, and 999. When any of these numbers are drawn, the VA Lottery takes a big financial hit. BIG hit. If you don't believe it, go through the numbers yourself and see what the payouts are for triples compared to all others. So, if the VA Lottery were unfair, you would expect them to rig the drawings such that triples show up less often than they should. That's an easy thing to check for, so I did. Here is what I found.
There are 10 triple numbers out of 1000 possible numbers that can be drawn. Therefore, over a very long period of time, 10 triples should be drawn for every 1000 drawings, straight up. That works out to exactly 1.0000% Over the course of the lottery (excluding a brief promotion where a third drawing was occasionally added), there have been about 14,963 drawings. Therefore, there should be (roughly) 150 triples drawn, 10 for every 1000, right? So here is the actual result.
There have been a total of 157 trips drawn.
There have been a total of 14963 numbers drawn.
That works out to 157*100 / 14963 = 1.0493% of triples drawn, slightly better than fair.
So, over the entire history of the Virginia Lottery, they have drawn slightly MORE triples than fair. If they were cheating, it seems HIGHLY unlikely that they would draw more triples than statistics predicts, since that hurts them financially.
If anything, the Virginia Lottery has gone through a long stretch where they paid out more money on the most popular numbers, the triples, than statistics would predict. I therefore conclude that they are not rigging the drawings to cheat us. Thanks for reading!