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I would think it more likely people pick days of the month and month numbers (birthday, wedding day, etc). That hypothesis can be tested by looking at the number of winners vs the winning numbers. Draws where all numbers are over 31 should have relatively fewer winners.

Also, if the numbers have to be picked from a grid, the layout of the form may drive what people pick (similar to why 2580 is a relatively popular security pin. See https://www.datagenetics.com/blog/september32012/)

And interesting squares you picked there :-)

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I used to work at a lottery company and I can confirm your hypothesis. Numbers below 31 and magical numbers like 7 or 13 are picket more frequently. In a game where we draw 5 numbers out of 90 the combination 1,2,3,4,5 was played 4-5000 times a week on average, which means 1 lottery ticket in every 3000. Which is a bad strategy in games where the pot is splitted up equally between the winners. You could have statistically duoble your expected win (return on investment) picking unusual numbers. But ROI was still at 70%.

[Edit] We had a lot of funny stories dealing with obsessed players. One of them accused us of cheating because he found the winning numbers in the newspapers of the last week, in the section of financial news. He also sent us copies of the newspapers, filled with encirceld numbers. It remembered me of one scene in the movie A beautiful mind where John Nash does the same with words.

> funny stories dealing with obsessed players

aka sad stories of the mentally ill people your company was exploiting.

Lottery: A tax on people who are bad at math.

- Ambrose Bierce, The Unabridged Devil's Dictionary

I've done the math on my local lotteries and the EV tips into the players favour when the jackpot gets a bit bigger than 30 million, even if you share a jackpot with one other. This is due to the return of 3,4,5,6 and 7 numbers all adding up, combined with the fact that the jackpot is largely from what others have spent in previous weeks.

If I was completely rational I'd bet my house on it when it tips into my favour. I am not completely rational.

>If I was completely rational I'd bet my house on it when it tips into my favor. I am not completely rational.

It would be rational to bet your house on it if you could repeat the draw an infinity of times, so that the outcome would converge to the expected value.

A rational actor would consider risk of ruin.

Not wanting to protect the company, but it's called the National Gambling Company, so it's pretty obvious for everyone what its products are, the participation in the games is anonymous, the customers have the opportunity to opt out (not buying lottery tickets) and it is owned by the government therefore it's profit is nothing more than a special form of tax. Their games are supervised directly by the Ministry of Finance.

I could came up easily with a bunch of well know companies/industries breaking all these rules at once, but that's an other topic.

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