The Western States Heartbreak Lottery

Chris Z shares the reality of the math and illuminates the rollercoaster of emotions that is annual WSER lottery day in his newsletter Das Letter Z:

Here are the official preliminary counts for the 2026 lottery: there are 11,335 entrants and 93,140 total tickets in the hat.
…
The breakdown of entrants by how many tickets each person has matters a lot, because a few people with hundreds of tickets shift the odds dramatically for everyone else.

And how cruel numbers can make you feel:

The unfairness, the randomness, the statistical cruelty, they all reinforce the same romantic idea: if your name finally gets called, it means something. The lottery is unreasonable. It’s also beautiful. A machine built on math that keeps the myth alive.

Unreasonable, yet beautiful – could be the motto for our sport, distilled into a couple words.