Like clockwork, the Powerball lottery counterbalanced Mega Millions all odd number drawing with its own set of all even numbers.
On Tuesday March 8th,
Mega Millions drew the odd number white ball combination:
03 17 19 41 55 (all odd and 4 prime).
The next night,
Powerball's winning Wednesday night numbers were selected:
12 28 28 40 48 (all even and all divisible by 4).
The chances of all even or all odd number combinations are approximately 2.57% for Mega Millions and 2.37% for Powerball. This means that we would expect to see between 4 to 6 occurances of both odd and even combos within a year. However, the laws of randomness have been tilting the scales to the even side only in both of these games.
During the past Mega Millions year, we observe 3 all even combinations and only 1 all odd. The yearly Powerball deviation is more extreme with 5 all even combos and 0 all odd combos.
While this imbalance may seem to contradict randomness, we need to remember that the probabilities of flipping a coin are 50% heads and 50% tails. During any short term observance, we may find streaks of all heads or all tails for a while.
Thus, we must not find it unusual to see that only one side of the lottery even-odd bell curve has received the majority of occurrences recently. We must conclude that in total, the outside sets perform as expected. While we know that all odd number combinations are overdue, we must play the odds and say that we are sure that either all even or all odd numbers will be drawn, but we don't know which. Since there is a 50% chance either occurring, we need to continue playing the two outside sets of numbers to be sure of capturing the next winning combination.
