10
The 1-2-3-4-5-6 problem
The line everyone picks because they assume nobody else would.
A consecutive run is exactly as likely as any other combination, there is no mechanism by which balls avoid order. Every lottery statistician says this and nobody believes it.
The genuinely unlucky part is what happens if it comes up. An enormous number of people play that line every draw, precisely because they have reasoned that nobody else would. In a shared-jackpot game, the prize would split so many ways that the biggest win in history would pay out like a middling one.
The same is true of any popular pattern: dates under 31, diagonal lines on the slip, last week's winning numbers. Picking them does not change your chance of winning. It changes what winning is worth.
Almost none of this was luck
Read them together and the pattern is uncomfortable. The ticket in the bin was a checking habit. The expired prize was a deadline. The syndicate lawsuit was a missing piece of paper. The harassment was a publicity decision made in the first week.
Four of the ten were genuinely just fortune, the washing machine, the near miss, the changed line, and Jack Whittaker, who did most things right. The other six were preventable with habits that take under a minute each.
- Sign the back of every ticket the moment you buy it.
- Scan it rather than reading it. Your eyes are the weak link.
- Photograph it, front and back.
- Know the claim deadline.
- If you play in a group, write the agreement down before the draw.
None of that improves your odds by a single decimal place. It just stops the good version of the story being lost on the way home.