Lottery’s luckiest choices revealed

Lottery lovers, we’ve got your numbers.

If you have a dollar and dream — and believe you can beat the odds — start with 14, 36 and 48.

Those three numbers have hit more than any others among the 414 winning Mega Millions tickets sold between 2005 and Jan. 12.

And since June 24, 2005, when the latest version of the game launched, they’ve appeared on the winning six-number combinations the most often.

That’s according to an analysis of Mega Millions payouts compiled by Matthew Vea, a consultant in Ernst & Young’s financial services department in Midtown, who looked at the results of every drawing over the last 4½ years.

The game encourages players from 12 states, including New York and New Jersey, to plunk down a dollar in the hope of becoming fabulously wealthy.

A player’s six picks must match the numbers that come up when officials randomly draw a half-dozen balls numbered 1 to 56.

With odds of more than 175 million to 1, jackpots routinely reach hundreds of millions. The record payout was $390 million in 2007. Tuesday’s jackpot is an estimated $121 million.

The number 14 is a big winner.

Not only has it appeared on 48 of the 414 winning tickets since 2005 (a rate of more than 11 percent), it’s been the second-hottest number during the last three months, averaging just 30.2 days between appearances on somebody’s lucky ducat, Vea’s analysis shows.

The number 36 also popped up 48 times since 2005, while 48 appeared 47 times. Three others — 53, 5 and 46 — hit 46 times.

Experts caution that every drawing is random, so playing “hot” or “cold” numbers is, statistically speaking, still a losing proposition.

“It’s perfectly natural that in a small sample size, 414 drawings, that you would have a [hot] number,” said NYU math professor Gerard Ben Arus. “But of course if you get a huge sample size, tens of thousands, it would equal out.”

The most popular numbers chosen by players for New York’s Numbers and Win 4 games are 111 and 0000, lottery organizers say.

After 111, the next most popular Numbers choice is 222, followed by 333, 777 and 999.

Among Win 4, they are 1111, 2222 and 3333.

Officials said that news events sometimes spur a run on numbers, such as 911, which sells out every year on Sept. 11, and 1549, the number of the US Airways flight that hero pilot Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger safely landed in the Hudson River a year ago.

Omen numerals