The Lottery Wheeling System Myth
Lottery wheeling systems are not some mystical mathematical secret. It doesn't take a degree from the university of lottery wheeling.
But let's kick off with the single most crucial fact you have to know about any lottery wheeling system. You'd be forgiven for not knowing it. You're not supposed to. Otherwise you wouldn't spend money on the 'gurus' wheeling systems.
FACT: Wheeling does not increase your chances of winning the jackpot.
Ouch. Surely that's the only reason to wheel lottery numbers, isn't it?!
No, it isn't. But let's back up for just a second, and briefly define what wheeling means. Wheeling lottery numbers at it's most basic is simply about picking a group of numbers, and generating every possible lottery entry from those numbers.
For example, if we're playing a pick 6 lottery, and we picked a group of 7 numbers - say the numbers 1 to 7 - we write down all the possible entries using those numbers:
01 02 03 04 05 06
01 02 03 04 05 07
01 02 03 04 06
07
01 02 03 05 06 07
01 02 04 05 06 07
01 03 04 05 06 07
02 03 04 05 06 07
And those are the numbers you would play. That's it really. Of course, the number of lines gets bigger very fast when you add a larger pool of numbers. Covering just 9 numbers requires 84 entries!
Proper Wheeling Systems
Of course there is more to it than this. Proper wheeling systems do more than just combine all the numbers together.
There is a whole branch of mathematics that deal with this (called 'combinatorics'). And the clever part here is combining your pool of numbers together in such a way as to:-
- Provide a certain level of 'win guarantee'
- Minimise the number of entries required to meet that guarantee
It's a serious (and competitive) area of maths. People actually compete to try and produce the best possible optimised systems.
'Win Guarantees'
Don't get the wrong idea though about what these are. Win guarantees do not mean you will automatically make a profit playing the lottery (just not gonna happen!).
A win guarantee means the wheel has been optimised for a certain level of win, e.g. it may come with a guarantee that says "you win a match 4 prize if 4 of your pool of 10 numbers are drawn".
Which is a useful thing to have. That and the fact you can also end up winning multiple prizes. That is, if 5 of your pool of 10 numbers were drawn, you may have got a match 5 prize (depending on the wheel design), have definitely got at least one match 4 (and possibly more than one) and have probably also got multiple match 3 prizes too!
But wheeling itself doesn't make any difference to your chances of winning the jackpot. That obviously does happen anyway as a result of buying more entries. But it's not the reason to be using wheeling systems!
You will notice the bigger, more visible vendors of wheeling systems are careful how their claims are phrased. Wheeling does increase your chances... IF it means you end up buying more lottery entries than you normally would. But it isn't wheeling that is increasing your chances, it's buying more entries.
But this wheeling myth prevails, carried forward by people who have read the careful wording and misunderstood what is really happening.
