On the Performance of Lottery Winning Strategies: A Case Study of Oyo State Lottery, Nigeria

Aims: In this study, we investigated three lottery strategies: random, low and high frequency strategies, usually employed by lottery players. For the three strategies, we considered whether the selection of numbers in Oyo State lottery occurred with equal probability, whether the lottery winning numbers occurred with equal probability, whether the performance of a strategy was associated with the amount of historical information considered and whether a game strategy outperformed others using the game’s history.
Place and Duration of Study: The Oyo State Lottery, a type of lottery in Oyo State, Nigeria was used as a case study.
Methodology: The data used for this research work consisted of the year 2011 lottery winning numbers of the Daily draw type of game as collected from the Oyo State Lottery Commission. The data was used to simulate the random, low frequency and high frequency game strategies. Various statistical tests which include runs test, Chi-square goodness of fit test, one-way ANOVA test and Least Significant Difference test were carried out to test the different hypotheses defined.
Results: For H1 (Each number is equally selected by the public), |Z|=20.98 >Z1-α/2 =1.96. For H2 (The winning numbers occur with equal probability), P>.05 across the months of the year. Considering H3 (There is no performance difference in the strategies with small amount of historical information), P=.06 and for H4 (There is no performance difference in the strategies with large amount of historical information), the one-way ANOVA test gave P=.20. For H5 (There is no difference in the performance of the three strategies), ANOVA test yielded P=.013. Further test revealed that low frequency and random strategies; low and high frequency strategies were different from each other at 5% significance level.
Conclusion: Players do not select lottery numbers randomly, but rather based on certain strategies. Oyo State lottery winning numbers are selected with equal probability. Thus, we can say that the process that the Oyo State Lottery Commission is using in generating winning numbers is not biased. From the simulation results, the low frequency strategy has the highest number of matches among the three strategies considered. The introduction of small and large amount of historical information component into the ANOVA tests revealed that no strategy is better than others among the three strategies considered. Using full historical information, however, it was discovered that the three strategies were significantly different from one another at 5%. Further tests revealed that random and low frequency, low and high frequency strategies are significantly different from each other at 5% level of significance. Thus, for this study, the low frequency strategy performed better than the other two strategies.