Lumping all world lotteries together introduces a lot of handwaving, so let's start with what we know and work forward. According to the article, this event ha

Lumping all world lotteries together introduces a lot of handwaving, so let's start with what we know and work forward. According to the article, this event happened for South Africa Powerball, where 5 numbers are chosen out of 45, and 1 number chosen out of 20: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_African_National_Lottery#PowerBall https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_African_National_Lottery... That same Wikipedia page does some of the math for us: The chance of one combination being chosen is 1/42,375,200. So if we count all possible sequential combinations, N, we'll know that the chance of a single winning combination being sequential is N/42,375,200. Say the powerball comes out as any number 6 <= M <= 20. There are 6 ways the numbers 1-45 could be picked such that M is part of the sequence. That's 90 ways total. If the powerball is 5, there are only 5 ways, same continuing down to a powerball of 1 where there's only 1 combination of numbers 1-45 where it could be part of the sequence. 90 + 5 + 4 + 3 + 2 + 1 brings us to 105 as our N. So this single event had a probability of 105/42,375,200, or 1/403,573. This means that for similar lotteries one would expect to see a sequence after about 200,000 picks. EDIT: If you only count events where the powerball is the high number, as happened this time, N goes down to 15, making the odds 1/2,825,013, so one would expect such a sequence after about 1.4 million picks.