Statistics Prove Lottery Isn't a Game of Chance at All

by Leila Brillson

The lottery's appeal stems from the fact that anyone could be a winner; it is a game of chance. But Canadian statistician Mohan Srivastava, who has degrees from MIT and Stanford, has realized one completely "duh" factor. In order to receive scratch-off lottery tickets, a machine must first print the numbers, over which the latex is pasted. "It would be really nice if the computer could just spit out random digits," Srivastava told Fox News. "But that's not possible, since the lottery corporation needs to control the number of winning tickets. The game can't be truly random." Anything that can't truly be random, he concluded, can be hacked using statistics and laws of probability.

What he discovered was pretty simple: he looked for numbers that never repeated, increasing the likelihood that they'd appear underneath the scratch off. He was right, and his trick netted him winnings nearly 90-percent of the time. Since Srivastava wasn't interested in making money or ripping off the lottery, he duly reported his findings to the Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corporation, which promptly pulled the flawed game.

In order for the lottery to be a true game of chance, gaming commissions all over North America wouldn't be able to control the frequency of the payout. Srivastava's discovery only confirms that there is nothing haphazard about the lottery; the game is designed to lure and entice consumers, preying on the hope that each ticket will be the "lucky" one. Unfortunately, the system is a little better crafted than that, and stats prove it.