According to lottoreport .com there were about 25.5 million tickets sold for Saturday's drawing. In 2020 that was about normal for jackpots in the $300 million range, and about 2.5 times as many as for a typical starting jackpot.
Random probability says we should expect 1 5+0 winner out of every 11.688 million tickets, and sales were about 2.2 times that many. For a random distribution the chance of having 43 winners with sales of 25.5 million tickets is basically zero. It's so low that I can't even calculate it in an Open Office spreadsheet because there's a limit of 20 decimal places, so the chance is reported as 0.00000000000000000000%.
The closest I can come with th 20 decimal place limit is that the chance of producing 29 winners is reported as 0.00000000000000000001%. To help put that in perspective, the chances of producing a jackpot winner by selling only 1 ticket (yes, just one single ticket) is 0.0000003422%. Having "only" 29 5+0 winners with sales of 25.5 million random tickets is about 34.2 trillion times less likely than your chance of winning PB with a single ticket.
Of course having winning numbers that are all birthday numbers makes the chances of any given number of winners more likely. There are only 169,911 ways to pick 5 numbers from 1 to 31. Since Saturday's winning numbers were one of the 169,911 possible birthday combinations everyone who played birthday numbers had a 1 in 169,911 chance of matching all 5 winning numbers. If all 25.5 million tickets that were sold had used only birthday numbers the most likely number of 2nd place winners would have been just about 150.
Of course not all tickets played only birthday numbers. We often hear that 70 to 80% of tickets are QP's, so we can probably figure that only about 1/3 of the 25.5 million tickets had numbers that were selected by players. That's about 5 to 7.5 million tickets. If 7.5 million ticket played birthday numbers the most likely number of 5+0 matches would be 44. Of course we could expect a couple of 5+0 winners from the 18 million random QP tickets, which would make a total of 46 winners.
The final takeaway is that unless the number of winners was statistically high it's a safe bet that an enormous percentage of the players who chose their own numbers stuck to birthday numbers.
