Q. What is the easiest way to pick very strong lottery numbers to play? Have you ever heard of the Brad Duke lottery system?

OK, first some quick background. Brad Duke was a Powerball winner back in 2005. He won the headline grabbing Powerball jackpot of $220 Million, and after choosing the lump sum payout he more than happily banked $85 Million.

In an interview with Fortune Magazine in 2007 Brad revealed the incredible lottery system that was responsible for his big win.

Don’t worry, I’ll reveal exactly how it works right here.

Here’s what Brad did.

The Brad Duke Lottery System

First he took the last 6 months of Powerball results. Then he figured out the 15 most commonly drawn numbers from those results.

Then he used a wheeling system to combine those 15 numbers together.

In a nutshell, that’s it.

Here’s what is missing from Brad’s explanation though.

Firstly, he doesn’t tell us what kind of wheel he is playing. Is it an abbreviated wheel (potentially fairly cheap), or a full wheel (very expensive indeed for 15 numbers!). He also doesn’t tell us if he’s playing one Powerball number or covering all of them!

Secondly, he doesn’t say how many tickets he’s buying.

You can deduce from his comments though what the likely answer is when he says things ‘got bigger and more complex’.

So he actually started buying a lot more tickets, and as a result won more small prizes.

This, of course, is not a revolutionary lottery system. (Win Lotto Systems is based on the simple premise of ‘buy more tickets, and win more small prizes, while you wait for a big win’).

The Numbers Bit

If you play Brad’s system, you may want to arrange yourself a bank loan first…

Because even if you ignore the Powerball number, there are still 3,003 ways to arrange your 15 most drawn numbers. Cover every Powerball number on top of those and you’ve just bought over 105,000 tickets… feeling rich yet..?

So if for one very charitable moment we assume that analysing those past results actually worked, you still have to either stomach spending $210,000 on Powerball tickets and hoping you’re right – or choose a small amount of those combinations and hope you don’t eliminate the winning one.

Did Brad buy $210,000 of tickets for that draw? No.

Does playing the 15 most drawn numbers from the last 6 months even improve your chances of winning one jot anyway? No.

The Reality Check

The important thing to learn from Brad’s story, is this.

Brad Duke won the Powerball because… he was damn lucky. One of the hundreds(?) of tickets he bought for that draw just happened to be the winning combination.

Now he may believe that combination was more likely to come up. But that doesn’t make it true.

Remember: if the lottery was preditable in this way, it would not be random. And that would put the well paid Powerball Execs in a whole heap of legal trouble – illegal lotteries are not well liked by the legal system!

Still don’t believe me?

Think of it this way. Every week millions of players all over the world do similar analysis, over all kinds of different time periods – but never win!

That very same draw when Brad won the jackpot, hundreds of thousands of Powerball tickets would have been bought by people doing similar analysis to him.

So why didn’t they all share the jackpot? Because they weren’t lucky like Brad Duke!

Back To The Question…

So the idea of strong or weak lottery numbers is a total nonsense. They just don’t exist. There are winners and losers – but we only discover which ones those are after the draw is over and done.

Despite that, there are endless pointless lottery systems that are based entirely on analyzing past results. Do they work? No.

There is no secret formula to guaranteed winnings. No winner who can tell you the secret to how to pick the best numbers.

There is a very limited range of things you can do to improve your chances of winning (and I’ll happily give you those lottery tips and tricks for free).

But does that stop the lottery being fun to play? Of course not.

Good luck in the next draw, however you pick your numbers.

It’s another EuroMillions Superdraw – which means this Friday will crown 25 ticket holders as instant Millionaires.

But this is also on top of the normal jackpot draw, currently sitting at a cool €29 Million.

How come you’ve not heard about it.

Because only UK players get a chance for these bonus EuroMillions prizes.

(Tip: I’ll tell you in a moment how you can play in this draw from outside the UK – it’s easier than you think)

The UK has an add-on game called Millionaires Raffle – every EuroMillions ticket bought in the UK gets printed with an extra unique raffle number. And one of those numbers wins £1 Million every single draw (Tuesday and Friday).

The big deal though is this Friday (23rd December).

Because this Friday is Millionaire Friday.

EuroMillions (UK) are paying out 25 x £1 Million prizes for this draw only!

Now that has to be a draw worth playing.

There’s THREE extremely good reasons why.

1. For exactly the same ticket price, you now get 25 times the chance to win a million. On top of your chances of winning EuroMillions itself of course.

(Technically it’s not exactly 25 times because more people will play this draw than normal, so it may be more like 15 – 20 times, but I’m not complaining!)

2. This bonus game is a raffle (like a prize draw) not a lottery. Which means 25 tickets in this draw must win a million.

3. Only the UK play Millionaires Raffle. And they are only 1 of the 9 countries who play EuroMillions. Which means you already beat the other 8 countries to the money if you buy a ticket in the UK.

Buying EuroMillions Tickets From The UK

If you live in the UK, no problem, you can get your tickets anywhere and you’re OK. (Or you can buy online from the official national lottery site too).

Outside the UK, you still have some options.

1. Get a friend in the UK to buy tickets for you. Make that a trusted friend.
2. Buy online from a 3rd party ticket seller. Typical an expensive way to play, but sadly I couldn’t find any that bought their tickets in the UK anyway – so if you know one add a comment below and I’ll let everyone know.
3. Play in a syndicate that buys tickets in the UK. I’ve found 3 that do: Big Fat Lottos, Love My Lotto and Tips 4 Winning. All are good reliable syndicates so choose the one you like best.

Play This Draw – It’s A Gift!

Look, it’s not often you get these ‘Superdraws’ so don’t miss them when they come up.

This is a no cost way to instantly get a significantly better chance of winning. Which is just the right kind of occasion to be spending your squirreled away winnings pot.

You know, the ‘save the small wins for a Superdraw’ pot.

Unless you already spent it on pizza

There’s a rabid buzz in the air. People are foaming at the mouth and starting to go a little crazy…

[Spoiler... all is revealed below]

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That’s right, crazy time = the Spanish Christmas El Gordo lottery.

You know, the once a year draw with the prize fund of €2.5 BILLION!

This is a behind the scenes video shot during last years draw. The stage is somewhere behind all the mad melee.

If you watch closely you’ll see the school children from San Ildefonso picking up the balls drawn from the machine. It’s tradition that pairs of children from the school are involved every year.

They sing out the winning numbers whilst they deliver each of the lucky winning balls to the officials sat at their desk overseeing the madness.

This is El Gordo – Normal Rules Do Not Apply

For those who haven’t seen it before, the level of excitement is pretty odd just for a lottery draw.

Spain as a whole loves the Christmas El Gordo lottery draw. It’s part of being Spanish to play in the draw.

So it’s also part of being Spanish to spend hours watching the big draw on TV.

And it does take hours too. About 3 hours in all.

That’s because El Gordo pays out thousands of different prizes. And each prize is also drawn out of a ball machine too.

So first they draw a winning number from one machine, then the prize that ball has won from the next machine.

Can You Imagine Watching This Live On TV?

You already know your number has won, but you then have to sit and watch them draw the amount. It could be €100 or it could be €4 Million..!

Now there’s a tense few seconds in anyones life

There are actually hundreds of jackpot prizes too. Nothing massive, just lots of them – which is just the way it should be. (Who cares if 1 person wins 200 Million, I want to see 100 of you win 2 Million!)

Here’s just the top prizes for El Gordo 2011:-

• 180 x €4 Million prizes
• 180 x €1.25 Million prizes
• 180 x €500,000 prizes
• 360 x €200,000 prizes
• 1,440 x €60,000 prizes

There’s about a bajillion more prizes beyond the major ones too.

Playing El Gordo

I always give El Gordo a play. Tickets are more expensive than most lottery draws, but it’s great fun for a once a year punt.

WARNING: Buying El Gordo tickets online is a mine field!

You can buy tickets from various online ticket sellers. But what you get for your money does vary dramatically.

A standard ‘decimo’ ticket costs €20 if you buy it from a vendor in Spain. So if you can, buy them yourself or get a friend in Spain to.

Online, expect to pay double. But don’t get stung by the rip-off companies who charge a lot more than that.

Or if you want the easy option (the one I use these days) join me in one of these El Gordo syndicates. This costs a one-off £20 and gives you a share in 10 decimo tickets. So 10 times the chance of winning.

It’s good honest crazy fun.

You probably won’t see the El Gordo draw live, unless you have a satellite feed from Spain (or er, live there!) – so I’ll make sure I post up a list of all the winning numbers as soon as I have them.

You’ve seen the shiny lottery systems, may have bought one. It didn’t work of course. So are there any lottery systems that work?

There is so much lottery junk online. Not just systems, but bad advice and poor information everywhere.

Just dare to ask what works in an online forum, you’ll get ten ‘experts’ swearing on their mother’s life that asking Felix the psyhic feline is the only way to win.

Then another ten who say system ‘x’ works because they never won a thing before, until they started playing using system ‘x’ and matched 3 out of 6 on the first try… whilst neglecting to tell you that they bought 20 times more tickets than they ever did before.

Results Mean Nothing

The thing is that individual results do not mean anything.

I know that sounds a bit backwards. But because the lottery is random, and so very hard to win – isolated results one way or the other do not mean anything useful.

You Need See The Big Picture

Here’s a good example why:

Take Gail Howards wheeling books – some of the oldest lottery systems online. The smartluck.com website hasn’t been run by Gail for a long time and now includes a fair amount of factually incorrect advice.

But the site is full of testimonials of people who have won jackpots. And they are real winners too. So the system must work then, right..?

Well, not exactly.

These people have NOT won because of any secret system. They won because 100,000 Gail Howard fans have been buying lots of tickets for 30 years (yes, over 30 years!).

And because they were told to play games that are easier to win (i.e. Pick 5).

What About The 99.9% Who Lost!

So what happened to the other 99,900 people who bought Gail’s books but haven’t won..?

Did they not bother to use it? Did they not implement the clever techniques properly? Or were they just unlucky.

How can they claim these are lottery systems that work if the vast majority do not win when they use them?

Smart Luck Or Plain Random Luck

If you use any system and win big, it just means you were lucky.

Now if everyone who used a system won big within, let’s be generous here and say 10 years, that would really mean something.

But it can never happen, because the lottery just doesn’t work in any way that can be ‘beaten’. It really is random and every combination is just as likely. One of the worlds best maths Professors (a real one!) actually stated this in a newspaper yesterday.

A better chance of winning is the best that you can expect from any system. And that is worth pursuing.

So Are There Any Lottery Systems That Work?

It really depends on what you mean by ‘work’, and exactly what those lottery systems claim to do.

So when I assess and test lottery systems, I’m looking at the value of the insights and strategies that they offer. But I’m also looking at what they claim they can do for you, and if they are making innaccurate claims or giving bad advice.

Testing does not mean using them for a week or two and drawing unhelpful conclusions!

So when you read my lottery system reviews, bear in mind that anything I do recommend has value.

Because I’m one of the very few voices online that won’t recommend lottery garbage for a sly backhander.

This post was originally a comment on my page reviewing lottery systems, but I thought it was worthy of getting a post of it’s own.

So with thanks to Hobbs for hitting the nail squarely on the head again, here’s a guest post from him about which is the best lottery system to use.

Wisdom Of Hobbs Part 1

To your attention folks. One random event is not effected by another. There is no such thing as elimination of any number with any new lottery drawing. Each number has an equal chance of being drawn.

If there was a way to select numbers that were more likely for the next drawing, that would make wheeling systems highly effective.

There is no lottery system in existence that will reduce the number of possible combinations that can be drawn in any particular game, what it is, is what it is. If it’s 14 million possible combinations, that is what it is.

Don’t bother spending hundreds of dollars on Steve Player’s horse manure that he charges hundreds of dollars by the pound for. He plays well on the cravings of those that see big dollar signs in their eyes while reading the ads on the systems that he has for sale, only to end up wondering what happened after their pockets have been cleaned out and discovering that the systems don’t work. After discovering that they’ve been had, they seek a refund. To their amazement, there is none…

Don’t bother with the Black Book and getting shot in the leg. You may bleed to death or end up with a limp for the rest of your life, while rushing because there are only so many copies left. If you stand behind a horse long enough at a distance, you’ll see what comes out of the Black Book. The Lotto Black Book is absolute rubbish.

Ken Silver makes his silver sound so shiny and brilliant. After you fall for it and use it, you’ll discover that the silver isn’t so shiny and brilliant, but tarnished.

So which is the best lottery system to use? All the systems that are for sale depend on the word ‘IF’. If… in the lottery rarely happens. If is a small word, but has large significance. Folks, don’t fall for it, save your money.

The only sure way to win the lottery is to play every possible combination in that particular game. If you have 14 million dollars to spend, why spend it on a chance to win 2 million dollars.

Have a great day everybody. Thanks Lottery Guy.