Do lottery superstitions hold any real power? How does math explain when winning the lottery coincides with superstitions? Why do strange numbers occur?
You heard the news about someone winning the lottery using the law of attraction. Or maybe a story crossed your feed about the same combination getting drawn twice in a row.
Coincidences happen in the lottery. Math can explain every one of them.
This article is about what is actually going on behind those stories, and why lottery superstitions keep getting the credit that probability deserves.
Table of Contents
Lottery Superstitions, Unusual Events, and the Improbability Principle
Rare things happen. That is not a mystery. It is math.
When someone wins the lottery the same week they started practicing Feng Shui or visited a tarot card reader, it feels like those things must have worked. But that feeling has a name and an explanation: the Improbability Principle.
David J. Hand, emeritus professor of mathematics at Imperial College London, put it plainly:
A set of mathematical laws that I call the Improbability Principle tells us that we should not be surprised by coincidences. In fact, we should expect coincidences to happen. One of the key strands of the principle is the law of truly large numbers. This law says that given enough opportunities, we should expect a specified event to happen, no matter how unlikely it may be at each opportunity.1
Tens of millions of people buy lottery tickets every day. With that many draws happening across the globe, the chances that at least one winner is also practicing some form of lottery superstition are not close to zero. They are, from a statistical standpoint, expected.
No mysticism involved. Just a very large number of opportunities.
To describe what that looks like visually, I built a PHP simulation using PHP’s random_int() function in March 2020. The simulation generates lottery combinations at scale and maps each result to a grid, so you can watch how a truly random process distributes outcomes over many draws. That work is documented at A Truly Random Lottery with a Deterministic Outcome.
In a 4/20 lottery with 4,845 possible combinations, I ran 45,000 simulated draws and found that combinations like 1-2-3-4 and 5-10-15-20 do eventually come up. Not because anything predicted them. Because randomness, stretched across enough trials, works through the entire outcome space.
If that same 4/20 game held one draw per week, a combination like 1-2-3-4 would be statistically expected to appear roughly once every 93 years on average. Lottery superstitions have nothing to do with it.
Real lottery draws across major games tell the same story. Below are actual winning combinations that most players would call bizarre or impossible:
| STRANGE COMBINATIONS | DRAW DATE | LOTTERY |
| 15 – 16 – 17 – 19 – 50 | July 05, 2013 | Euro Jackpot |
| 9 – 31 – 32 – 33 – 34 | May 02, 2014 | Euro Jackpot |
| 24 – 32 – 33 – 34 – 38 – 39 | April 02, 2014 | Irish Lottery |
| 30 – 31 – 32 – 35 – 37 – 40 | April 04, 2015 | Irish Lottery |
| 2 – 3 – 5 – 7 – 9 – 23 | December 19, 2009 | Australian Lottery |
| 4 – 21 – 22 – 24 – 25 – 26 | January 06, 2007 | Australian Lottery |
| 11 – 13 – 14 – 18 – 19 – 37 | May 09, 1992 | Australian Lottery |
| 11 – 12 – 16 – 17 – 18 – 23 | April 06, 1999 | Australian Lottery |
| 11 – 12 – 15 – 16 – 54 | February 20, 2016 | Powerball |
| 7 – 21 – 22 – 24 – 28 | December 23, 2011 | Euro Millions |
| 7 – 10 – 11 – 12 – 19 | August 18, 2015 | Euro Millions |
| 1 – 40 – 42 – 43 – 47 | October 09, 2015 | Euro Millions |
Every one of those combinations appeared because randomness eventually produces all valid outcomes across enough draws. No lucky charm, ritual, or belief system made them come up.
Combinatorial mathematics describes how different combinatorial compositions are distributed across all possible outcomes. That is a different kind of information than what any lottery superstition provides.
The Law of Attraction: The Most Widely Believed Lottery Superstition
In 2004, Cynthia Stafford spent serious time meditating and visualizing herself winning exactly $112 million. Three years later, that was the amount she won. The story spread widely and became one of the most cited cases of the law of attraction supposedly working in a lottery context.2
The math tells a quieter story. With tens of millions of people buying tickets every day, and many of them practicing visualization or positive thinking, it was only a matter of time before one of them won. The belief gets the credit. Probability did the work.
Two cognitive biases keep this going. Availability bias leads people to overestimate how likely something is based on how easily they can recall a vivid example.3 Stafford’s story is vivid and memorable, so it makes winning feel closer than the underlying math supports. Confirmation bias then locks in the belief by steering people toward stories that confirm what they already want to believe, while the far larger number of failures goes unnoticed.4
The more people apply any lottery superstition to their play, the more likely it becomes that one of them wins by chance. That win looks like proof. It is not.
Using Dreams to Pick Lottery Numbers
In 2014, Terry Vigus had a vivid dream and won nearly £1.2 million.5 Stories like that travel fast. The conclusion many people land on is that dreams can somehow point to winning numbers.
They cannot. Dreams reflect the contents of a person’s mind, not the future output of a draw machine. Millions of people play the lottery and plenty of them dream about winning. When one of them wins, the dream gets remembered. The thousands of others who dreamed and lost never make the news.
Availability bias does exactly what it is designed to do: a memorable story creates a false impression that the link between dreams and lottery wins is real. The math disagrees.
Psychic Readings and Tarot Cards
In 2007, Judy Mayer from Winnipeg, Canada, won $6.8 million after a tarot card reader named Katerina gave her a set of numbers.6 Katerina had written all but one of the winning numbers on a business card. Mayer used those numbers for over a year before changing the last digit on her own, from 45 to 46. That single change was what produced the win.
The fortune teller got the numbers wrong. The winning digit only appeared because Mayer changed it herself. What happened was a coincidence inside a global field of lottery opportunities so large that coincidences like this are always going to show up eventually. When the story broke, Katerina’s phone started ringing.
The more predictions a fortune teller makes across a large enough audience, the more likely it becomes that one of their clients will win. That is probability at work. The credit rarely goes there.
Feng Shui and the Lottery
In 2010, a man in Sydney, Australia, reportedly won a jackpot after applying Feng Shui to his life, including fixing a gold coin to his doorstep.7 The story framed the practice as the cause.
This is a straightforward case of false causality. Two events happened close in time. One did not cause the other. With millions of people worldwide practicing Feng Shui, and millions more buying lottery tickets, the overlap was always going to produce at least one winner eventually. The Improbability Principle accounts for the outcome. Feng Shui does not.
Using Pets to Pick Lottery Numbers
Billy Gibbons let his pet chicken, Kiev, wander across a calculator and land on numbers, and he reportedly won a jackpot.8 Unusual? Sure. Evidence that chickens can sense winning numbers? No.
A bird wandering across a keypad is, effectively, random selection. That is what lotteries are built on. The randomness of the selection method was not what produced the win. The underlying probability of winning, however small, was. Gibbons joined the pool of winners the same way every other winner does.
Crediting Lottery Wins to Spirits and Ghosts
Some lottery winners attribute their jackpot to the guidance of someone who has passed.9 Finding personal meaning in a win that way is understandable and harmless.
As an explanation of how a lottery draw produced a specific outcome, it has no mathematical foundation. Wins happen continuously across a massive global player base. Some of those winners will have been thinking about a loved one they lost. The connection is emotional, not causal. False causality and confirmation bias together make it feel more significant than the math supports.
When the Same Numbers Are Drawn Twice
Professor Hand documents several cases where the same lottery numbers appeared in draws very close together:
- On September 6, 2009, the Bulgarian lottery drew a set of winning numbers and then randomly selected that exact same set four days later.
- On October 16, 2010, an identical combination appeared that had been drawn just weeks before.
- In 2007, the North Carolina Cash 5 lottery produced the same winning numbers on July 9th and July 11th.
- In 1980, Maureen Wilcox bought tickets with winning numbers for both the Massachusetts State and Rhode Island Lotteries, but each set was on the wrong ticket.
When these stories surface, people often conclude the lottery must be rigged. The actual explanation is simpler. Lottery draws happen thousands of times across dozens of countries over decades. The probability of two consecutive draws matching is tiny but it is not zero. Given enough time and enough draws, it was always going to happen at some point.
Strange is not the same as impossible. Given enough opportunities, the strange becomes inevitable.
What Lottery Superstitions Can Cost
Lottery superstitions do not often stay harmless. When belief in a method edges into obsession, things can go wrong in serious ways.
A man in China spent ten years living under a bridge, separated from his family, trying to build an algorithm that could predict lottery outcomes.10 A decade of his life, spent trying to crack a system that probability tells us cannot be cracked.
In 2018, a man spent all his savings and overdrew his account celebrating what he thought was a winning ticket. He had misread one digit. When the mistake became clear, he threatened to take his own life. Police had to step in.
These are not rare edge cases. They are what can happen when a person treats the lottery as a system to be beaten rather than a game of chance with a negative expected value. The harm is real.
If you or someone you know is struggling with problem gambling, please reach out to a licensed mental health professional or a gambling helpline in your country.
What Math Actually Offers Instead of Lottery Superstitions
I built Lotterycodex website in 2017 around a single idea: replace superstition with something that can be examined, tested, and understood.
The foundation is combinatorial analysis. Every individual combination carries the same probability in any single draw. But when combinations are grouped by their combinatorial composition, those groups are not all the same size. Larger groups take up more of the total outcome space and, under the law of large numbers, appear more often across many draws.
This is not a prediction tool. It does not tell you which numbers will come up next. What it does is give a clearer picture of how different combinatorial compositions are distributed across the full sample space.
The law of large numbers (LLN) and the law of truly large numbers (LTLN) are not interchangeable. LLN is a formal theorem describing how observed frequencies converge toward theoretical probabilities across many trials — it is the basis for how Lotterycodex describes the long-run behavior of combinatorial composition groups. LTLN is an informal observation that rare events eventually show up when opportunities are numerous enough — it is what explains why lottery superstitions sometimes coincide with wins. Treating them as the same concept leads to confused conclusions about what the math actually says.
The full methodology is in the guide The Lottery Formula: Combinatorics and Probability at Work. The Lotterycodex calculator applies it to specific lottery formats.
The lottery is entertainment. No approach, mathematical or otherwise, changes the fundamental randomness of the draw.
Understand Lottery Games Using Math-Based and Data-Driven Analysis
Explore the Lotterycodex Calculator
No. Lottery superstitions have no effect on the outcome of a random draw. When a winner happens to be using a superstitious method, the cause is probability and the law of truly large numbers, not the method itself. With millions of people playing globally, coincidences between lottery superstitions and wins are statistically expected.
Two cognitive biases are mainly responsible. Availability bias causes people to overestimate how likely something is based on vivid examples they can easily recall, such as a widely reported win linked to a ritual or belief. Confirmation bias causes people to notice and remember information that supports the superstition while overlooking the far larger number of failures. Together, they make lottery superstitions feel more credible than the evidence supports.
No. The law of attraction does not influence random probability. When someone wins the lottery after practicing visualization or positive thinking, the explanation is statistical. With enough people using the method, a win among them is eventually expected by the law of truly large numbers. The win confirms nothing about the method.
Because randomness does not exclude any valid combination. In a truly random draw, every combination has the same probability of being selected. Over a large enough number of draws, even combinations that look unusual or highly regular will eventually appear. The law of truly large numbers explains this. There is no special property to those numbers.
Combinatorial analysis describes how different combinatorial compositions are distributed across the full outcome space. Combinations can be grouped by their composition, and those groups vary in size. Larger groups appear more frequently over many draws under the law of large numbers. That is a property of combinatorics and probability theory, not prediction.
Yes. It has happened in documented cases across several lottery games. The probability of it occurring in any specific pair of consecutive draws is extremely small, but not zero. Over thousands of draws across many countries and many decades, such an event is statistically expected to occur at some point. The law of truly large numbers explains this.
Explore more:
References
- The Improbability Principle [↩]
- Why Hasn’t Anyone Used The Law Of Attraction To Win The Lottery? [↩]
- What Is the Availability Heuristic? [↩]
- Confirmation Bias And the Power of Disconfirming Evidence [↩]
- Loughton man’s ‘vivid lottery dream’ comes true [↩]
- Psychic doles out a fortune — again [↩]
- Belief in feng shui ‘triggers jackpot win’ [↩]
- A guide to take home the jackpot [↩]
- £26m lotto winners say mum’s ghost is behind their jackpot scoop [↩]
- Chinese man lives under bridge for 10 years to crack lottery code [↩]