For Those Who Think Getting AA vs. KK Makes Online Poker Rigged

The Freakonomics blog reports that an Israeli lottery last week picked the same six winning numbers that had been picked three weeks prior. Predictably, this seems to have led to speculation of fixing, as

Lottery officials denied allegations of rigging: “We are in the business of luck, and when it comes to chances and probabilities anything is possible, even the rare and infrequent, like in this case,” said Dr. Chaim Melamed, the statistics expert for the national lottery company. An examination of the machines and lottery balls revealed no irregularities.

You’d have to pretty dumb to rig the lottery in so obvious a way, a way that is guaranteed to invite further investigation. Then again, if you’ve got superuser access to an online poker site that you own, you’d have to be pretty dumb to call all-in with T-high on the river in the biggest tournament your site will run all year.

I suppose if this were evidence of fixing, it would be because someone had weighted the balls or otherwise rigged the mechanism by which the numbers were selected in a way that was accidentally replicated three weeks later. And I suppose that is more likely, at least prior to a thorough investigation, than that this occurred as a result of dumb luck. After all

Yitzhak Melechson, a statistics professor at the University of Tel Aviv, said that “the incident of six numbers repeating themselves within a month is an event of once in 10,000 years.”