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SOUTH AFRICAN POWERBALL COMES UP 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. WHAT ARE THE ODDS? LET’S
FIND OUT!


WAS THE LOTTERY RIGGED? LET’S DO THE MATH!

David Leibowitz

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Published in

Making of a Millionaire

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5 min read
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Dec 3, 2020

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Screencap of South African Lottery results taken December 2, 2020

On December 1, twenty lucky people won the PowerBall lottery in South Africa,
and are millionaires (in rand) . They will each receive about $371,630 if
converted to equivalent U.S. currency. But that’s not the insane news. The
wildest development is that the numbers selected, though not in order, were 5,
6, 7, 8, and 9. The bonus Powerball number selected was, surprisingly, 10.

According to the South African lottery officials, all 20 winners played manual
numbers — meaning a computer did not select their numbers. As expected, eyebrows
are being raised along with calls for inquiries. “I’m calling for Justice here,”
said one tweet.


Screencap from Twitter December 2, 2020


THE ODDS OF THE COMPUTER SELECTING CONSECUTIVE NUMBERS RANDOMLY

So just how rare is a lottery pull of six consecutive numbers? The answer might
surprise you. Before we start, let’s review the South African PowerBall rules.
According to the website, you use a pen or pencil to mark five numbers from a
possible set of one through fifty. Then, for an extra dollar or so (I haven’t
done the U.S. dollar conversion), you can opt for the “plus” option, the
PowerBall. That’s one extra ball numbered from one to twenty.

To determine the odds of a consecutive selection, you need to use a combination
function to determine all possible outcomes. The combination function uses
factorials where n is the total set; in this case, the number of balls: 50. The
next factor is m, which is the number of balls we must select without
replacement. For the South African Powerball, that’s five balls.

Replacing the placeholders for five balls and then using the COMBIN() function
in Excel, we find a total of 2,118,760 total possible outcomes. Excel is awesome
and saves us from messy factorial multiplication.

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WRITTEN BY DAVID LEIBOWITZ

2.2K Followers
·Writer for

Making of a Millionaire

Appeared in: Xbox Mag, Forbes, CNN, OneZero & industry rags. @tech, industry,
running. On TikTok (AI): @dsleib X (other stuff): @dleib

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