A Probabilistic Analysis Of The Dutch Lotto

The size of the jackpot of the American powerball lottery that fell in August 2001 has generated a lot of interest in the probability of winning a lottery, both in the United States and elsewhere. Many people dream of becoming rich in a single moment. We calculate the probabilities of winning prizes, and the expected pay-off in Section 3. Before doing so, we give a brief history of the Lotto and its rules in Section 2. In Section 4 we address an important issue: are the numbers and color drawn truly random? We analyze draws of the Lotto from 1974 onwards. It is impractical to test whether each possible draw occurs according to its expected frequency. It is possible, though, to test different implications of the hypothesis that the numbers and colors are drawn randomly. We end with some concluding remarks in Section 5. Keywords: Lottery, Jackpot, goodness-of-fit