Do you want to know your chances of winning the National Lottery jackpot based on the history of numbers and sequences that have already passed? Now, a new lottery calculator has been made available to help people determine the likelihood of their favourite numbers coming out in the jackpot based on the entire history of the National Lottery. The Lottery Calculator tells you when you would have won the lottery and how much (assuming the numbers in your sequence have ever come out), including all dates of wins.
This is another way by which people can attempt to work out the best numbers for them to choose. However, the Lottery Calculator is not perfect and it falls for one of the oldest errors that a betting man or woman can make – falling for “The Gambler’s Fallacy”.
Lottery Calculator and “The Gambler’s Fallacy”
The Lottery Calculator arguably enables belief in The Gambler’s Fallacy, the idea that a certain number of sequence is “due” because it has not come up in a long time or has never come up in a sequence. It presents the idea that the law of averages determines what numbers will come up and when, based on a false belief that a sequence of events has a “memory”. This is, of course, is not true. Lottery draws have no agency, neither does a roulette wheel or any other form of gambling.
Freak results do happen. We recently reported a story from Hungary where the exact same numbers came up twice – one draw after the other – leading to shock and an investigation into lottery fraud. It is the first and so far only recorded instance of the same numbers coming up twice in as many draws. There is no guarantee that the same numbers will not come up again.