PCSO lottery sparks concerns on fairness, local mathematician calls for audit to dispel cheating allegations

Recent PCSO lottery results have sparked questions about fairness, but a local mathematician insists that claims of cheating can only be disproved by an audit.

While it is not impossible to win the jackpot in consecutive lotto games run by the Philippine Charity Sweepstakes Office (PCSO), according to mathematician and researcher Guido David of OCTA Research and the University of the Philippines (UP) Institute of Mathematics, it is extremely rare and has very little chance of happening.

In a recent interview with DWPM Radyo 630 on January 26, David used a hypothetical scenario to show how the likelihood of winning the lottery jackpot in subsequent drawings would decrease. According to him, there is a two percent chance or less of winning in each draw when several hundred thousand bettors are seeing themselves as the winners. However, in successive drawings—two draws, for example—it is equivalent to 0.04 percent, or two percent multiplied by two percent.

According to David, the chance drastically drops as the number of drawings rises. For example, he said that after ten consecutive drawings, the likelihood decreases very significantly.

While acknowledging that additional victories are “not impossible,” David cautioned against depending just on statistical analysis to discover abuses and instead suggested process checks.

“Statistics will never prove that there is something different in the process, so they need to audit to look at the processes if there is a fair draw,” he said.

The exact percentages he also revealed indicate that the odds of winning the jackpot reward are one in five million for the 6/42 draw, one in fourteen million for the 6/49 draw, and one in twenty-nine million for the 6/55 draw.

Original story by: Asia Gaming Brief