Winning strategies: A case study of Oyo State Lottery, Nigeria

Abstract

In this study, we investigated three common lottery strategies: random, low and high frequency strategies, usually employed by lottery players. The Oyo State Lottery, a type of lottery in Oyo State, Nigeria was used as a case study. 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 a game strategy outperformed others using the game’s history and whether the performance of a strategy was associated with the amount of historical information considered. It was discovered that lottery numbers were not chosen randomly by the players. Also, the winning numbers occurred with equal probability. The low frequency strategy performed better than the random and high frequency strategies. Further tests involving amount of historical information however showed that no strategy was better than others in the long run.

Keywords: Tickets, Lottery strategy, Winning numbers, Hypothesis testing, Historical information