
What I love about the lottery is its unpredictability. Okay, some call it randomness of picking numbers.
There are people out there trying to sell you systems guaranteed to make you a winner, but for the most part, they are just trying to take your money. I can think of a few legitimate systems, lottery wheels for example, but even wheels require luck.
Now, how many times do triples come up in Pick 3 games? I do know this: in any one game, the odds of picking all three numbers, straight, correctly is 1 in 1,000.
In Maryland, it would seem, triples are happening quite often.
Sunday night’s winning Pick 3 numbers were 5-5-5, making it the second triple drawn in just one week.
That brings to eight, the total number of triples drawn since the beginning of the current fiscal year.
Add in a quad in the Pick 4 drawings, and The Maryland Lottery has paid out $17.6 million to players of triples and quads since the first of July.
“Triples have been very frequent this year,” said Maryland Lottery Director Buddy Roogow, in a press release. “It seems like we’ve had an unusual amount, but mathematically, triples have the very same chance of coming up as any other numerical combination.”
Pick 3 players view the “triple” recurrence as a happy coincidence, since it typically means a huge payout, and a loss for the lottery. Sunday’s 5-5-5 drawing awarded over $1.6 million to players and took in $379,455 in sales.
The Maryland Lottery’s Pick 3 drawings are held twice a day.