With a bonus ball #20
https://youtu.be/QjaB1JBfJLQ
😆 Sounds like a scam scene from Dumb and Dumber.
Bad choice of numbers to choose on your ticket , as lots of other people will have done the same.
20 lucky winners in this case.
I assume thats higher than normal for SA lottery
Maybe in a weird way, that is what the scammers were thinking, many people play easy #'s, so there is no way they can catch the ringleaders.
They were completely oblivious to the fact the picked numbers were too fishy to be believed.
if that is a scam , the downside of that is that the number sequence is highly suspicious and highly visible to all.
Thats risky strategy , to hide in a crowd of 20?
I dont think it was a scam , just a coincididence.
It looks really really weird of course , but the odds are the same as any other combo
Don't take this the wrong way, but you would never make it as a detective.
shareI dont know why they dont just roll the balls in a tumbler , after sales close , like they do in the UK - very transparent.
But that article says they use a "industry standard" Rnd numb gen , used by lotterys the world over with all kinds of checks and balances on it.
Its tooo obvious to be a scam , if they wanted 20 differenty winners they could pick a normal looking set of balls and just pay 20 different people sacross the country to pick them.
Someone got in and corrupted it.
South Africa is suffering from governmental rot.
This incident is an example of it.
> It looks really really weird of course , but the odds are the same as any other combo [emphasis mine]
Exactly. And let's note a few other things:
How many lotteries are there worldwide? I'm not gonna count 'em up, I'll just point to a partial list -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotteries_by_country I assume most of those run pretty frequently, at least twice a week. But that doesn't include a lot of other random number games. Here in the USA, state level Keno games usually run every few minutes. As do the Keno games in Vegas. If any of those had a weird outcome it would hit the news.
Yes, 5-6-7-8-9-10 is suspicious looking. But so are 11-12-13-14-15-16, and 14-12-10-8-6-4, and a lot of other combinations. Had the lottery hit any such sequence, people would be reacting in the same way.
Finally, there's nothing special a priori about December 1, 2020. Lotteries, Keno games, etc have been going on for a long time.
So if the question asked is, "what are the odds that on Dec. 1, 2020 the South African lottery would hit 5-6-7-8-9-10," those odds are high, about 1 in 42 million. But that's the wrong question. The correct question is, "what are the odds that some big, publicly visible game of chance will, at some time, have some suspicious appearing outcome?" Those odds are a lot lower; I'd say something like this was bound to happen sooner or later.
> I dont think it was a scam , just a coincididence.
Agreed. The news clip said they've got audits and have checked everything, which they should do. But given that those checks show everything was on the level, I don't think there's any cause for suspicion just because it's a weird sequence.
Thankyou!
Talking of wierd coincidences though:
The UK national lottery started in the early 90s
6 balls , 1 to 49 , odds 42m to 1
usually 0 to 3 or 4 peopel would split the jackpot weekly.
One week , though , a couple months after it began about 100 people got 6 numbers and won the jackpot.
I can only assume that was because they all picked some onbious sequence like 123456
I thionk the history id lookupable ..imma gonna try ..
I knew it! the official website trys to hide this and says:
"A record nine UK players won a EuroMillions jackpot in 2015."
But wikipedia has the real history
Lotto was originally called The National Lottery, but was renamed Lotto in an update in 2002 after ticket sales decreased. Lotto is by far the most popular draw, with around 15 to 45 million tickets sold each draw. The most winners for a single jackpot was 133 in January 1995, each player winning £122,510. "
Imagine winning 16 million and then having to share it with not 1 , not 2 not even 3 other winners , like normal - but 133!
> Imagine winning 16 million and then having to share it with not 1 , not 2 not even 3 other winners , like normal - but 133!
Ouch! You think you've suddenly got enough money to retire but find out that no, you still have to work for your asshole boss.
When we had the big, billion dollar plus Powerball jackpot a few years ago I was playing tickets like everyone else. I was also trying to figure out ways to split the jackpot with as few people as possible if I won. My first idea was to bet the last game's winning numbers; e.g., if the last winning numbers were 4-6-23-31-45-17, I'd bet those numbers for the next game. Most people would stay away from that bet, thinking "my God, the odds of all the same numbers hitting twice in a row must be one in trillions!" Nope, as you said, it's no more or less likely than any other outcome. I'd have the same chance of winning but if I won I'd split the jackpot with fewer people. But then I thought, a few other math geeks out there might try the same strategy, and I'd end up splitting it with more people, not less. So I used the last winning numbers but changed one number when I made my bet.
Never did win. Sucks.
I think "last weeks numbers" was one theory on how our UK many winners thing happened , pretty much any system like that - enough people play it that most will shy away , but enough cold hard mathematicians (who for some reason are still playing :) ) will know 123456 is just as good and pick that , and if more than 3 do , you'd have been better off getting random ticket.
The only sure fire solid avoiding-multiple-winners system ive heard is
"Pick numbers over 31"
This is to avoid all those birthdays-and-otherdates pickers
but dont pick 31,32,33 etc or those cynics will be sharing your win lol
Also my favorite scene from Casino (1995)
https://youtu.be/JcZHSGyos6g
(One min fifteen sec)
my password
shareShe goes "its a one in a 54 million or whatever chance of winning"
Yeah but whats the chance its 5,6,7,8,9,10?
Dam that must be in the Billions/trillions - no? am I wrong?
replying to myself, this must be god or the angels. they do this so humans stop and think. heyyy whats going on here? is there something more going on? what is that?
shareLike has been pointed out those numbers are no less probable than any other number combination. This is as interesting as car odometer reaching 100000 or whatever.
A more interesting case would be if the machine selects six SEQUENTIAL numbers in SEQUENTIAL ORDER. The probability for that would be 1/6!=1/720 compared to the case where the numbers are selected in RANDOM ORDER. But since the video didn't mention the order in which the numbers were selected I can't comment more on this.
It seems that people are not comprehending what 1 in 42 million really is.
Say you were with a friend and he flipped a coin. The coin landed heads 30 TIMES IN A ROW!
The odds of THIS occurrence is 1 in 30 million, better than then these lottery #'s.
Now if you were to think this coin if your friends is fair, you are far to trusting in human nature.
The problem isn't misunderstanding 1 in 42 million. Rather, you misunderstand the statistical universe for this situation.
Unlikely events happen, given enough opportunities. Suppose I flip a coin 10 times. What are the chances it will land the same every flip? 1 in 512 -- there are 1024 possible sequences of heads or tails, but there could be ten heads or ten tails.
1 in 512 is unlikely, right? But suppose I did this every day for a year. 365 sets of flips, same coin, 10 flips per set. The probability of the coin landing the same all 10 times at least once during the year is a little over half, 51%.
Let's say on May 9 the coin landed heads 10 times. You seize upon that and claim the coin is biased -- ignoring the context that this event had numerous other opportunities to occur and in fact this happened no more than expected. That's the "logic" of your position.
It's a common fallacy. A coin has a 50% chance of landing heads, but flip it enough and there will be some runs of several heads. And if a type of cancer occurs at a certain rate in a population there will be areas which, by random variation, have higher or lower rates. But it's common for residents of neighborhoods where three people got cancer in a year to assume the water is tainted, when in fact it might be just bad luck.
If you can show there was some reason to suspect *before* this happened that such an event was more likely in the near future than before, or that the South African lottery was vulnerable to compromise, or if you can show that 5-6-7-8-9-10 is somehow more suspicious that other such outcomes, e.g., 20-19-18-17-16-15, then it's a different matter.
Otherwise all you've shown is that among the tens of millions of big, publicly visible, government sponsored games of chance which have been played worldwide over decades, an outcome with the probability of one in millions happened at some point. That's not grounds for suspicion, that's just the odds playing themselves out.
BTW ...
>The coin landed heads 30 TIMES IN A ROW! The odds of THIS occurrence is 1 in 30 million
No, the chances of 30 heads in a row is 1 in 1,073,741,824, not 1 in 30 million.
Good news! South African authorities have found nothing out of the ordinary, the system has not been compromised, no indication of corruption or any funny business. That's a relief.
But it is not good for the South African people, because very smart, astute billionaire investors who have trouble trusting their own mother will now shy away from investment, the quick and definitive investigation will confirm in their minds that South Africa is not to be trusted for business ventures.They will put their money to work in a country that is less corrupted.
Can't be any worse than the Fortune Cookie Lottery from several years back.
They had several first place winners and several hundred second place winners. Didn't help that it happened on April 1st. Officials said the odds were impossible and launched an investigation. Turns out the first five numbers came from a fortune cookie so the odds went down from picking 6 random numbers down to picking just one number.
Turned out they were lucky. There were millions of cookies printed with those numbers.