Abstract

The Mega Millions Lottery is a game of chance, no skill possible. It’s played in most states and offers multi-million-dollar jackpots. Despite various popular lottery “strategies,” like lucky numbers, birthdays, anniversaries, astrology, studying past results, and so on, there is no skill in buying lottery tickets. This is because lottery winners are determined by picking numbers at random. If you think that the configuration of the planets or a pattern you saw in your oatmeal this morning has any effect on your chance of winning, then maybe you have apophenia, the tendency to perceive a connection between unrelated or random things. The chance of winning the jackpot is so low that if you buy a ticket, you will almost certainly lose. This doesn’t mean that everybody will lose. We will look at lottery results in the context of hypothesis testing and p-values.

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