If it's done properly, it's the same as any other sequence, right?

I don't know how many balls they have and whether there is replacement to tell you the actual number, but there shouldn't be anything special about this one among all the other possible sequences, except that it's more likely to be guessed.

Many repliers are computing the probability of this exact draw, but probably a more relevant consideration of "this" is "the odds of a 'suspiciously regular' combination being drawn". The probability of one of those occurring is (the number of such sequences you name):42,375,200, or that number over 42,375,200.

There is some inherent fuzziness in what you consider a "suspicious sequence", obviously. If you stick to entire sequences you don't get very many; however, if you consider "1 2 3 4 5" in the original numbers to be suspicious regardless of the bonus ball draw, then the number of such sequences starts going up fairly quickly. (Include things like [1,3,5,7,9], [2,4,6,8,10], [3,6,9,12,15], etc.)

It's pretty easy to get up to a couple thousand "suspicious sequences". For the sake of roundness and being a bit conservative, let's say there are 423 "suspicious sequences", in which case the odds of hitting one are roughly 1 in 100,000. You may choose to add another order of magnitude of "suspicious sequences" pretty easily, in which case it goes to 1 in 10,000. Given the number of draws done for this sort of lottery (dozens or hundreds a day, I'd guess), it's inevitable that sooner or later one would be hit on lotteries of this size.

Some of the challenge in weighting the number of sequences is they aren't all equally "suspicious". [1,2,3,4,5] is what most people would consider a "dead giveaway" (right or wrong), whereas [1,2,4,8,16,32] would probably bother fewer people. Some people might still find even [1,2,3,4,18,bonus 6] suspicious ("look how 'close' it was to 12345!"). So there's just some intrinsic fuzziness to the answer of how likely this is.

The same as any other combination of numbers. It's just harder to wrap your head around.

According to the article (assuming you're looking at this particular sequence):

> The chances of winning South Africa's PowerBall lottery are one in 42,375,200

Yes, as others pointed out, this particular sequence is the same as every other sequence. Or, the one person who said 100% is referring to the probability of something that already happened.

To give you a more charitable interpretation, the South African lottery Powerball can be 1-20 so there are 20 straights possible so 20 in 42,375,200. Or roughly 1 in 2,000,000 or roughly 40,000 years of weekly draws to see a straight.

It depends on how many samples. The odds that this specific drawing would yield this result should be one in 42 million, but the odds that a lottery somewhere would yield this result in our lifetime is substantially greater.

The same as any other combination, as quoted in the article, 1 in 42 million.

The question most people are probably thinking of is "What are the chances of any sequence of numbers being drawn?", not just this specific one in the article.

Isn't the real question "what are the odds of the lottery being random if this suspicious sequence comes up so soon"? I.e. given a specific sequence, how many weeks should you expect to wait before you see it? In the extreme if you would expect to see 1,2,3,4,5,6 after 500,000 weeks, but you see it in the first week, then probably the lottery is not random, right?

Exactly the same as for any other sequence of numbers.

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