I thought the information below would be of interest to FF5 players. It's the number of times each "skip" (from 0 to 10 skips only) has been drawn in the 7,481 FF5 drawings that have been held since July 16, 2001 until last night. "Zero skip" means the number didn't skip a drawing, or that it was drawn in consecutive/back to back drawings. (it repeated)
Zero - 5,278 times
One - 4,524 times
Two - 3,866 times
Three - 3,278 times
Four - 2,857
Five - 2,375
Six - 2,064
Seven- 1,855
Eight - 1,550
Nine - 1,354
Ten - 1,200
Of course there are 11 skips, 12 skips, 13 skips etc....all the way up to a 67 skip which happened only once. (One numbers sat out 67 drawings before it was drawn again) I know most players reading this don't have lottery software , but if you happen to see a number has gone missing for 60 drawings, start playing it every day because it's probably going to be drawn prior to sitting out 67 draws. 67 draws skipped is a record and I doubt it will be broken.
If you could see the above data plotted on a graph, it jumps right off the page at you that there have been a lot of numbers drawn from the last four drawings. If you increase it up to 10 drawings, you'd see that greater than 75% of all the numbers that have ever been drawn came from the previous 10 drawings. That's why it makes sense not to put too many long skips (numbers that have gone missing for a long time such as #34 which was drawn last night after sitting out 42 drawings) on the lines you play.
In the case of playing numbers from the last four drawings, here why it makes sense to play them; Over the life of FF5's 7,4821 drawings, 37,405 numbers have been drawn, and 16,946 of them came from the last four drawings. (45.3%)
It's too bad I cant get a graph into this post... A graph shows very quickly that the vast majority of numbers drawn were drawn very recently. I've looked at graphs of many other states Pick5 games and the same thing is true for them. Why more repeating numbers (zero skips) are drawn is a mystery to me, but it's true every where you go. Approximately half of all drawings have a repeating number. G5