Number preferences in selected Nigerian lottery games

Abstract In this paper, we examined two pairs of datasets from selected Nigerian lottery games to determine players’ number preferences. Data explorations were conducted in the first pair of datasets to identify patterns in players’ choices of lottery numbers. The question whether players preferred number combinations that are well-spread out regardless of their true theoretical probabilities was examined in the second pair. In the first pair of datasets, we find that most players have a preference for small numbers especially 1 and 9. They also prefer numbers with repeated digits and tend to avoid multiples of 7 and numbers containing 7 (except 7 and 77). The most popular numbers are 90 and 1. In the second pair of the datasets, more than 50% of the players preferred selecting well-spread out number combinations than expected by chance.