LotteryTexas Two Step's Bonus Ball works differently from every other bonus number on this site, and it's easy to assume it works one particular way when it actually works the opposite way. New York Lotto's Bonus Ball is drawn from whatever's left in the machine after the six main numbers come out — it mathematically can't repeat one of them. Texas Two Step's Bonus Ball is drawn from the exact same 1–35 range as its four main numbers, but independently, from a full un-shrunk pool — which means it absolutely can land on a number that already appeared among the main four in that same drawing. It happens regularly, and the real historical data on this site proves it.
The Actual Mechanism
Each Texas Two Step drawing runs as two separate, independent draws using the same 1–35 number range:
- Four main numbers are drawn from 1 to 35. These are the white balls, and matching all four (plus the Bonus Ball) wins the jackpot.
- The Bonus Ball — the red ball — is drawn separately, from the full 1–35 range again, not from whatever 31 numbers are left over. The machine effectively resets: every one of the 35 numbers, including the four that were just drawn as main numbers, is a live possibility for the Bonus Ball.
That's a real, deliberate difference from how Lotto Texas's neighbor games elsewhere on this site handle a bonus number, and it's the kind of thing that's easy to get backwards if you're used to a different game's rules.
The Proof, in 1,207 Real Drawings
Rather than take the official rules at their word, this can be checked directly against real drawing history: if the Bonus Ball were drawn from a shrinking pool, it would be mathematically impossible for it to ever equal one of that same drawing's four main numbers. Checking every Texas Two Step drawing on record from 2015 onward — 1,207 of them — the Bonus Ball matched one of the main numbers in 135 drawings, or about 11.2% of the time. That overlap rate is exactly what you'd expect from an independent draw off the same 35-number range (roughly a 4-in-35 chance per drawing that the Bonus lands on one of the 4 main numbers already drawn), and it's flatly incompatible with a shrinking-pool mechanism. You can see this for yourself on the full results archive — scan for any drawing where the Bonus Ball number also appears among the four main numbers.
How It Affects the Odds
Because the Bonus Ball is a fully independent draw rather than a narrowing one, the jackpot odds are the straightforward product of two separate probabilities: 1 in 52,360 for matching all four main numbers (C(35,4)), multiplied by 1 in 35 for the Bonus Ball landing correctly, giving overall jackpot odds of 1 in 1,832,600. That's a meaningfully different shape of calculation than New York Lotto's Bonus Ball tier, where the shrinking pool means the math has to account for exactly one ball being removed from contention before the bonus draw happens. Neither mechanism is "better" for a player — the odds work out to what they work out to either way — but they're genuinely different mechanisms, not just different numbers plugged into the same formula.
What This Means When You're Picking Numbers
Practically, it means there's no reason to avoid picking a Bonus Ball number that matches one of your own main-number picks — some players instinctively do this, assuming it "wastes" a number the way it would in a shrinking-pool game, but here it changes nothing about your odds either way, since the two draws genuinely don't interact. See the Texas Two Step statistics page for how often each Bonus Ball number has actually come up, or use the number trend chart to watch the Bonus Ball's own drawing-by-drawing pattern (or lack of one) directly.