The lottery
Choose 6 numbers from 1 to 49. Each week 6 numbers are drawn. There are C(49, 6) = 13,983,816 possible draws, and only one of them is yours.
From the slides: Counting.
Your ticket
Click six numbers, or let the computer choose.
Play
Weeks played
0
Best result so far
—
Jackpots
0
expected once every 13,983,816 weeks
What to notice
- The chance of matching exactly k numbers is C(6, k) C(43, 6 − k) / C(49, 6): choose which of your numbers were drawn, then choose the rest from the numbers you did not pick.
- About 44% of tickets match nothing at all, and matching three or more happens less than 2% of the time.
- At one ticket a week, a jackpot is expected about once every 268,000 years. 100,000 simulated weeks is under 2,000 years of play — almost certainly not enough.