According the NJ Lottery website the Instant Match numbers are generated randomly. After adding the Instant Match to my playing of Pick 4 I notice how my match number hardly ever came in. So I conducted an experiment on Mar 17 2013, where I played the same number (1345) twenty times with the Instant Match option. That means that there were 80 so called random numbers generated, and you would think that these number would be evenly spread across the numbers 0-9. Sadly what I found was the following distribution.
Number Generated |
Number of times generated |
Percent of the total numbers |
0 |
14 |
17.50% |
1 |
1 |
1.25% |
2 |
16 |
20.00% |
3 |
2 |
2.50% |
4 |
1 |
1.25% |
5 |
1 |
1.25% |
6 |
16 |
20.00% |
7 |
11 |
13.75% |
8 |
10 |
12.50% |
9 |
8 |
10.00% |
The numbers I had chosen 1, 3, 4, 5 came in 2% of the time or less. Where as all the other numbers came in between 10% to 20% of the time. Ideally all the numbers should appear 10% of the time. So with 80 numbers in play I should've hit 8 times, not 5 times.
To me this is a really misleading game.