The Obama 666 Illinois Lottery result - a statistical view

Since his election in 2008, a few people have suggested that President Obama is the Antichrist because of a lottery result in his home state of Illinois, the day after his election. Some have mistakenly given the odds of this as being in the millions, others have even gone so far as to say that such an event could not occur by chance!

So let’s break this down at a high school math level.

The Illinois lottery uses a three-digit draw. This means that each draw gives out a number between 000 and 999 – there are 1000 such numbers. Since a lottery must be a fair draw (if certain numbers came up more than others, then people would notice and only buy those numbers!), we know that the chance of drawing 666 is exactly the same as drawing any other number – it’s 1-in-1000. The chance of a single lottery result being 666 on a particular day in a particular state is 1-in-1000.

However, the Illinois lottery has two picks a day, a midday pick and an evening pick. This halves the odds of drawing 666 on a particular day, to 1-in-500. (Imagine if we have a pair of dice and are betting on rolling a six; if you roll two dice, your chances of getting a six are twice as good as with just the one.) The chance of one of two lottery results being 666 on a particular day in a particular state is 1-in-500.

1-in-500 odds are still pretty high! However, we also need to factor in the PETWHAC, the “Population of Events That Would Have Appeared Coincidental”. It’s easy for someone to say after the fact that a sign of the antichrist is “a lottery draw in his home state the day after his election”, but in reality the same person would have been equally (if not more!) convinced by “a lottery draw in his home state on the day of his election“, or “a lottery draw in Washington the day after his election”.

Taking the latter, if we accept either that a 666 result in either the candidate’s home state or the state of Washington would be a significant event, then the odds are simply halved. (Instead of rolling two dice to get a 6, we are rolling four – two dice in Illinois and two in Washington.) The chance of a single lottery result being 666 on a particular day in a significant state is 1-in-250.

Now how about the date? A lottery drawing a 666 result the day after an election is surprising; drawing it the day before would also be seen as significant, and drawing it on the day itself even better! If any of these three days would be accepted, then we are now rolling three times as many dice – four on Monday, four on Tuesday and four on Wednesday. The chance of a single lottery result being 666 on the day of a president’s election – or the day before or after it – in a significant state is 1-in-83.

Further dilution of the odds are left as an exercise to the reader, but the fact is, I hope, clear that the odds of a particular president having the number 666 crop up in a personally significant lottery result are certainly no greater than 1-in-83.