Friday 13th
Lucky numbers made headlines recently as Missouri Pick 3 and Pick 4 lottery players snapped up lines with the numbers 7-7-7 and 7-7-7-7 for the games held on Saturday 7 July (07-07-07). The Pick 3 and Pick 4 games only allows a certain quantity of tickets with the same numbers to be sold, and this limit was reached hours before the terminals closed, leaving retailers to turn 7-7-7 enthusiasts away.
July 7, 2007 was deemed by lucky number experts to be the luckiest day of the century. Unfortunately, the Missouri lottery machine didn't agree, and out of the 14 numbers drawn the number 7 made just one appearance.
Now I've talked about the subject of luck a couple of times over the past few months, so I won't repeat myself by saying what nonsense it is from a statistical perspective. What I will comment on is the fact that the same people who believe in good luck don't tend to apply their own logic and avoid days that might be associated with bad luck.
Take this Friday, for instance, which will be Friday 13. Although this day has spawned countless horror movies and is generally viewed as the unluckiest day of the year (it's only "lucky for some" as our bingo-playing friends would say) we don't normally see a dip in the number of lottery tickets being played on this day. Which leads me to conclude that people don't generally believe in luck as something that applies across the board. Instead, I propose that the majority of people who believe in luck do so selectively - meaning only when it suits them to do so.
The problem with relying on luck from a lottery perspective is that lucky and unlucky numbers are all fairly widely known. If you asked most people what their luckiest number was, you'd usually receive a number between 1 and 9, with 4 and 7 being the most common responses. Ask them what their unluckiest number is and a significant proportion would say 13. With so many people giving the same answers, it is clear that any draw which happens to pick the "luckiest" numbers will be inundated with winners.
Many lottery players enter their lucky numbers and try to mix things up by also playing the last two digits of the current year. "Who else would do such a thing?" they probably think to themselves. The answer is quite a lot of people, actually, and if the last two digits of the current year make an appearance among two or three single digit numbers you can be confident there will usually be more than one jackpot winner.
If someone really thinks that they are lucky, they should play a single Lucky Dip entry and trust the universe to prove them right - or at least prove that random number generators really don't give a hoot one way or the other. And to all those Pick 3 and Pick 4 players who resisted the groundswell of superstition and avoided 7-7-7 but still managed to win, I say well done. If there were more people like you in the world it would be a much better place.
Article Last Updated: 10/07/2007 14:47:54
