Bulgarian Lotto

[Frank]

The whole world is buzzing with speculation about the amazing outcome of the Bugarian Lotto on the 6th and 10th September. In case you missed it, the SAME 6 numbers came out in CONSECUTIVE draws.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/8259801.stm

I've clicked on dozens of links to try and find out what format of lotto it is, even visiting the Bugarian TOTO site to find the results which were
4, 15, 23, 24, 35 and 42 although drawn in different orders. I never found them.
Anyway I believe I've eventually found that they used 6/42 for this particular one. The news stories say a mathematician said the odds of such an event were 4 million to 1. This is clearly incorrect, since the odds of ANY combination coming out (regardless of what went before) is Combin(42,6)-1= 5,245,785 to 1. The odds of this happening twice in a row cannot be less than this figure, ever. I see that in the second draw , 18 people won the lotto, when nobody won it 4 days earlier. So why did these people put those numbers on knowing they had just been drawn ? No wonder they are carrying out an investigation, including the ages and geographic locations of the winners to check for collusion - it does smell a bit.

If you want a really complicated explanation of the odds of a repeated result then http://www.thisisthegreenroom.com/2009/r...obability/ this takes the prize. it goes all around the houses to arrive back at what I said above, 5.2 million to 1.
What do you think ? Fixed ?