Here are the most common Philippine lotto numbers chosen by the PCSO

Posted on June 6th, 2011. Written by Rico.

The Philippine Charity Sweepstakes Office (PCSO) is the government corporation for the Philippine Lotto. Through a series of checks and balances, the PCSO ensures that each lotto draw is as random as possible. Despite this however, certain numbers seem more popular when you look at the winning combinations over time.

Local Arvin Castro describes himself as “an overdue college crammer, occasional programmer, ever-newbie mashup coder, romantic long-distance lover, retired blogger, and ex-puppy-love-fiction writer”. On a previous article featuring a way to randomly select numbers for the Philippine Lotto online (Pick the right numbers for the 6/55 lotto), Mr. Castro left the following comment, sharing an his online app that tracks numbers that appear the most on previous lotto winning combinations:

May ginawa ako na chart app. yung data galing sa PCSO site (updated every night),

Ang pinakamadalas mabunot e 26, at 14 times in 75 draws (6 months).
http://sudocode.net/apps/lotto/results.php?balls=55&range=15552000

Based on Arvin’s app, the following numbers have appeared the most on PCSO lotto draws for the past six months:

Lotto	Popular numbers (1st to 6th)
GrandLotto 6/55	26, 41, 18, 9, 51, 7
Lotto 6/42	15, 21, 23, 35, 19, 34
MegaLotto 6/45	15, 39, 13, 11, 3, 12
SuperLotto 6/49	14, 37, 36, 17, 24, 44

Another interesting piece of data: If we use Arvin’s app to track “All” winning combinations (all the way back to 2001), the following numbers have never been chosen as of this writing (1:34 AM June 5, 2011):

GrandLotto 6/55: 27
Lotto 6/42: 9
MegaLotto 6/45: 41
SuperLotto 6/49: 39

The last 6/55 winning combination (chosen last Wednesday) was 09-05-26-30-19-45. They’re currently the 7th, 6th, 1st, 18th, 26th, and 9th most popular numbers respectively, on Arvin’s all-time list for the 6/55 Lotto.

Note however all of the information available from Arvin’s app represent trends, not certainties. So don’t come crying to us (or Arvin) if the numbers you choose don’t make you an instant millionaire. We disclaim any and all legal liability for any actions you take based on this article.

On the app and its accuracy

We conducted a short interview with Arvin Castro over email about the development of his app, and the accuracy of its data.

Technograph (TG): So how did you build the app?
Arvin Castro (AC): It started out as a Twitter bot that I created early last year, @LottoPH, which tweets Lotto results everyday. I wrote a PHP script hosted at sudocode.net that scrapes [automatically fetches information from] the PCSO website hourly from 11PM to 5AM. It then updates the Twitter account at 6AM.

Then during the time when the jackpot went over 700+ million [back in November 2010], I thought, what if the results from past draws could be gathered to show which balls were drawn more frequently than others. I found this page at the PCSO site, which lists all the results all the way back from 2001. So I got the old data from there and the new results are still scraped from the site. I store the data on a [database].

For the app, I generate a frequency chart via the Google Charts API to show which balls where drawn the most times (on a very minimalist page). Adding a lucky pick suggestion for the Twitter bot was one of my plans, but I’m not currently working on it.

TG: How much do you trust the data you’ve compiled?
AC: I’m not really sure what to do with the data. Can order be found in something random, or is it really random?

First… [the] PCSO randomly selects from three sets of balls A, B, and C for each Lotto game and the only way to know which was chosen is to actually watch the show. Second, it might not be as simple as which balls were drawn the most times. I might consider the order on which a ball was drawn, i.e. [which] ball could be most likely to be drawn first, or if there were only 51 remaining balls in the thing, which ball is most likely to be drawn next?

Lastly, I’m not a millionaire yet.