Appleton, Wi United States
Member #118,173
October 24, 2011
199 Posts
Offline
Quote: Originally posted by KY Floyd on Mar 18, 2012
As others have said, the answer to the first question is yes.
I'd say the second question is a completely different question because of the way you asked it. 7 and 150 aren't specific results, and can be reached in multiple ways. Even if you view 1+1 and 6+6 as sums, they can only be acheived by rolling one specific combination. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 is a specific result, and is every bit as likely as any of the specific results that add up to 150.
With the dice you can bet on the sum and it won't matter which of thespecific results add up to that sum. The odds and payout will also be different for different sums. With the lottery you don't win anything just because your set of numbers has the same sum as the winning numbers, and the odds and payout are the same, regardless of the sum of the set you bet on. It's more likely that a set that adds up to 150 will be drawn than a set that adds up to 50, because more sets add up to 150 than add up to 50. That means that the sum is a completely meaningless number for 6/49.
KY Floyd:
Thanks for well written reply. Please excuse my Invincible Stupidity.
One the one hand, all lottery combinations will be picked the same number of times over a long period of time. I am inclined to believe this idea, it sounds logical.
On the other hand, combinations that add up to 150 (in a 6/49 lottery) will hit more often because there are more of them. My response is, So? So what?? (No sarcasm implied.)
How can both statements be true at the same time? Will combinations that add up to 150 get picked much sooner than combinations that add up to ..... 50?
NY United States
Member #23,834
October 16, 2005
4,780 Posts
Offline
Quote: Originally posted by BlueDuck on Mar 18, 2012
KY Floyd:
Thanks for well written reply. Please excuse my Invincible Stupidity.
One the one hand, all lottery combinations will be picked the same number of times over a long period of time. I am inclined to believe this idea, it sounds logical.
On the other hand, combinations that add up to 150 (in a 6/49 lottery) will hit more often because there are more of them. My response is, So? So what?? (No sarcasm implied.)
How can both statements be true at the same time? Will combinations that add up to 150 get picked much sooner than combinations that add up to ..... 50?
Is that the advantage?
BlueDuck
"all lottery combinations will be picked the same number of times over a long period of time"
It sounds logical, but that's not what happens. Each combination has the same chance of being drawn, regardless of what has happened previously. Suppose the game has gone on long enough that 1% of the combinations have already won. Those combinations are just as likely to be drawn in the future as any of the 99% that haven't been drawn, so in the next 1000 drawings we can expect that about 1% will come match one of the combinations that have already been drawn. That means that after the next 1000 drawings you'll have about 10 combinations that have been drawn a second time, while the vast majority haven't been drawn once.
That same thing will continue to happen with increasing frequency. When 10% of combinations have been sold we can expect that 10% of future drawings will result in a match to a previous drawing. Eventually 50% will have been drawn and we can expect every other drawing to result in another match. Continue long enough and the end result is that most combinations will have been drawn the same number of times, but a few will have been repeated and others won't have been drawn at all. Graph the results and you'll have a bell curve.
I'm not sure which 2 questions you're asking about, but there is no advantage. To simplify things let's imagine that there are 3 times as many combinations that add up to 150 as those that add up to 50. We would then expect the sum of the winning combination to be 150 3 times as often as it is 50 because there are 3 times as many of them. Compare it to drawing single cards from a standard deck. Instead of sums, split the cards into those that are spades and those that aren't. There will be 3 times as many in the second group as in the first, so each time you select a card there's a 1 in 4 chance of drawing a spade and a 3 in 4 chance of not drawing a spade. Knowing that there's a 75% chance of drawing a card that isn't a spade gives you no advantage in guessing which specific card will be drawn, because each of the 39 cards in the bigger group still has the same 1 in 52 chance of being drawn as each of the 13 in the smaller group.