2 Texans Down Under

Australia has a lottery called the Saturday Gold Lotto game and on television you can watch, if you wish, randomly selected ping pong balls with numbers on them jump around and then settle, one by one, into a chute. Many hundreds of people, I presume, are waiting each time to see if destiny is finally about to give them the wealth they have for so long so richly deserved.

I bought a lottery ticket once, back in Texas. It was one of those multi-million-jackpot nights when long lines of people were in front of every convenience store cash register, waiting to buy the fateful stubs by the handful. I succumbed. I bought one.

But then I got sleepy before the balls began to bounce on television, so I gave my ticket (100 per cent, no strings attached) to my son-in-law, Scott, and went off to bed. My generosity, after all, knows no bounds. At breakfast the next morning, the first thing Scott said to me was, “You didn’t have a single number right.”

Well, now, what are the odds of that?

Tuesday’s Brisbane “Courier Mail” newspaper ran a story on lottery statistics headlined, appropriately I thought, “Sorry, wrong number.” By Graham Readfearn and quoting frequently from Professor Rodney Wolff of the Queensland University of Technology (QUT), the story says the chances of a single ticket winning an Australian Saturday Gold Lotto jackpot are one in 14 million.

Okay, not quite that high. Wolff says the odds are actually one in 13,983,816.

He also says it’s 4,000 times easier to pick the winning number in roulette and that your chances of pulling an ace out of a just-shuffled deck of cards on the first try (I assume we’re talking about cards that are not marked) are 600 times better.

So who, knowing this, would spend money buying Saturday Gold Lotto tickets? Professor Wolff, for one. He admits to doing so regularly. And he doesn’t have a system for picking numbers.

That, for me, is the oddest fact in the newspaper’s story about odds, but not the only one.

In a similar lottery in Britain, for example, the supposedly unlucky number 13 has come up least often of all since 1994, only 146 times, while 38, the most frequently occurring number, has come up 217 times.

That doesn’t worry me, but something else does. As I said in an earlier blog, Australia is home to almost all of the world’s 20 most poisonous snakes. Professor Wolff, who works at nearby QUT, says, “I’m eight times more likely to die from snake bite than to win division one in Gold Lotto.”

He indicates, also, that I’m 250 times more likely to be kidnapped than I am to win the lottery here. (I’m not sure if the likelihood of my being kidnapped is a lifelong statistic or if these odds will change when my book on moving to Australia comes out.)

Since 250 divided by eight is about 31, does that mean I’m 31 times more likely to die from snake bite than I am to be kidnapped? Or only that Professor Wolff is 31 times more likely to die from snake bite than I am to be kidnapped. (Maybe he’s a member of a snake-handling sect or maybe he hikes in the outback a lot. Or gardens. Maybe I have below-average appeal to kidnappers.)

Regardless, don’t bother putting 38 into the lottery numbers you choose next week. In the “Courier Mail” story, Professor Wolff says the past is no predictor of the future in a system that is unpredictable, and he adds something that even I have assume all along, “A ping pong ball doesn’t have a memory.”

I’m glad. I switch channels before they can do their Saturday-night dance and I’ve whacked quite a few of them with wooden paddles. — Bob