Irish Lotto Statistics: Skipping Groups of Ten

When you play the Irish Lotto, you must select 6 numbers ranging from 1 to 45.  Do you think it is safer to spread your chosen numbers so that they are evenly spread?

One thing that can be noticed when studying the past Irish lotto draws is that a lot of the time, one or more groups of ten does not come out. The groups I am talking about are:

• 1 to 9;
• 10 to 19;
• 20 to 29;
• 30 to 39;
• 40 to 45.  

You can see that this amounts to 5 groups, so it would be logical to think that picking 2 numbers from one group and 1 number from every other group would give you more chances to win, but this is rarely the case: in fact, out of the last 112 lotto draws, in 98 of the draws, one or more groups of ten were skipped (that is 87.5%).

Another thing I have looked at is that since the last group (40 to 45) includes only 6 numbers, how likely is it that numbers from this group would be skipped alltogether in a draw? It turns out that 52 out of the last 112 draws did not include any of these numbers (46.43% of draws skipped the last group). When comparing all the groups of ten together, here is what I have noticed:

• 1 to 9: 30 out of 112 draws skipped this group (26.79%);
• 10 to 19: 24 out of 112 draws skipped this group (21.43%);
• 20 to 29: 20 out of 112 draws skipped this group (17.86%);
• 30 to 39: 17 out of 112 draws skipped this group (15.18%);
• 40 to 45: 52 out of 112 draws skipped this group (46.43%).

For some reason, it looks like some groups are more popular than others; this is something to consider the next time you select your lotto numbers, don't you think?