Study 02 · Hot numbers
The most common claim in the lottery world, measured over 51,375 chances in the official Florida record.
"Play the hot numbers" is the most repeated idea in the lottery world. It is easy to check, and almost nobody checks it. So we did, on the full record of the current 5/36 game.
Walk through 10,397 drawings in order. At each step, look back at the last 100 drawings, take the ten numbers that came up most often, and then watch the next 25 drawings. If hot numbers carry momentum, those ten should take more than their fair share of what comes next. Ten numbers out of 36 is a fair share of 27.8%. Repeating that walk across the record gives 51,375 individual chances — a big enough sample that a real effect of even half a percentage point would show.
| Measure | Result |
|---|---|
| Chances measured | 51,375 |
| Fair share for 10 of 36 numbers | 27.8% |
| Share actually taken by the hot ten | 27.8% |
| Difference | -0.0 points |
The hot numbers took 27.8%. The fair share is 27.8%. The edge is zero, to the first decimal place, across fifty thousand chances.
A single test can always be a fluke of the settings, so we repeated it with different look-back windows and different follow-up lengths, and ran the mirror-image test on the ten coldest numbers at the same time:
| Look back over | Measured over | Hot ten took | Cold ten took | Chances |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| last 50 drawings | next 10 | 27.7% | 28.0% | 51,700 |
| last 50 drawings | next 25 | 27.6% | 27.9% | 51,625 |
| last 50 drawings | next 50 | 27.7% | 28.1% | 51,500 |
| last 100 drawings | next 10 | 27.7% | 27.8% | 51,450 |
| last 100 drawings | next 25 | 27.8% | 28.1% | 51,375 |
| last 100 drawings | next 50 | 27.9% | 28.2% | 51,250 |
| last 200 drawings | next 10 | 27.5% | 28.0% | 50,950 |
| last 200 drawings | next 25 | 27.7% | 27.9% | 50,875 |
| last 200 drawings | next 50 | 27.8% | 27.9% | 50,750 |
Every cell sits on the fair share of 27.8%. Hot does not run warm; cold does not run cold. The result holds whichever way the question is asked.
The same arithmetic answers those too. If being hot carries no information, being cold cannot carry the opposite information — both ideas need the machine to remember what it did last week, and it does not. The balls have no memory, the draws are independent, and the record confirms it.
Because it is a way of choosing, not a way of winning. Somebody has to decide which five numbers go on the ticket. Quick Pick decides at random; birthdays decide by memory; Woozul decides with a modest lean toward numbers that have appeared more often in the verified record — about 25% more likely than the rest, never guaranteed. That produces varied, plausible tickets and a record of what you played. It does not change your odds, and this study is why we say so on every page.
Florida Lottery official Fantasy 5 results, 13,254 draws from 1989-05-02 to 2026-08-10, validated for completeness and tagged by matrix era and draw type. The figures on this page are produced by a script that runs against that record, so they can be recomputed from the same source at any time. Last updated September 22, 2026.
What this does not mean. Nothing on this page improves anyone's chance of winning. Every draw is independent, and a fair game cannot be beaten by studying it. We publish these results because they are true, including the parts that work against our own product.