# Statistically, does the previous result of lottery help you making better choices

I know the statement that the previous event won't affect the current event.

But what if the statistic of the previous results(large amount of data) shows that the probability of one particular ball appears is higher than other balls (for example if there are five balls numbered as 1,2,3,4,5. The statistic shows that ball number 5 has a higher probability than 1/5, since the balls are not perfect sphere). Then I can state that I have a higher winning chance if I choose ball number 5.

It seems the previous result do affect my choices. Is there contradiction between those two statements？

If $5$ is actually more likely, than sure, you can. However, just because $5$ has come up more in the past doesn't necessarily mean that it is actually more likely. It could just be that it came up more likely due to random chance. For instance, if you flipped a coin $100$ times and $52$ times it was heads you wouldn't want to conclude the coin was slightly biased towards heads. It could just as easily be a perfectly fair coin; getting $52$ heads out of $100$ is a perfectly likely outcome for a fair coin. However, if it had come up $90$ out of $100$ heads, it would probably be cause to infer that the coin is biased. For cases somewhere in the middle there are methods to quantify what the likely bias of the coin is. This is a broad subject called statistical inference.