We’ve just wrapped up Spain’s famous El Gordo Christmas lottery, and next week comes El Niño. Around the holidays, many people wonder: is winning just a matter of luck, or does statistics have more to say about it?

Plenty of myths surround the lottery: “buying tickets from a certain shop brings good luck” or “some numbers are luckier than others.” But how much truth is there really?

From a probability standpoint, the odds of hitting the jackpot are 1 in 100,000. Small, right? Still, your chances are actually higher than winning the top prize in Euromillions (1 in 76 million) or matching all six numbers in the Primitiva (1 in 14 million).

Source: El Confidencial.