Brad Duke Lottery Strategy (the Powerball Winner)

The Duke - Brad Duke lottery strategy

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 happily banked $85 Million.

In an interview with Fortune Magazine in 2007 Brad revealed the lottery strategy 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 played. 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. (e.g. Win Lotto Systems is based on the simple idea of ‘buy more tickets, and win more small prizes, while you wait for a big win’).

The Numbers Bit

If you wan to use Brad’s system to win the Powerball, 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 you have to either stomach spending $210,000 on Powerball tickets and hoping you’re right. Or choose a smaller 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 anyway? M’eh, not to any degree large enough that it can be proven.

Quick 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 many 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 automatically make it true.

Remember: if the lottery was reliably predictable 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 not sure?

Think of it this way. Every week players all over the world do similar kinds of analysis, over all kinds of different time periods – and don’t win!

That very same draw when Brad won the jackpot, thousands of other players doing similar analysis to him would have also bought Powerball tickets.

So why didn’t they all share the jackpot?

Because they weren’t as lucky as Brad Duke was!

It’s Not All Bad (Wiggle Room)

The idea of playing the 15 most popular numbers is not entirely without merit.

Lottery machines are imperfect. They are just mechanical devices designed to be as random as possible. But that’s the wiggle room – they are not perfect.

So it is theoretically possible for some numbers to be just that bit more popular for a reason.

It’s important to remember though that this will never be to such a degree that it will be obvious. It will never be so big that it can be proven in the real world.

But it may exist.

Despite this, there are endless lottery systems and software that are based entirely on analyzing past results. Do they help? M’eh. Not in a way they can ever prove. Ironically it’s the ones that make it sound like they’ve ‘proven it works’ that you need to worry about more.

There is of course no secret formula to guaranteed winnings. And no winner who can tell you the secret to how to pick the best numbers for the lottery.

But there is some stuff you can do to improve your chances of winning (and I’ll happily tell you about that in my lottery tips and tricks for free).

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

P.S. If you’ve ever wondered how the whole Powerball annuity/lump sum thing works, you can read how is the powerball lump sum calculated.

35 Comments so far ↓

  • Mickey

    Here is a tip, although the numbers could be 9,8,7,6,5 don’t play em, it’s highly unlikely it will win.

    • LG

      Hi Mickey

      But the fact is everything is highly unlikely with a lottery game – what makes you think those numbers are any less likely? Just because they make a pattern doesn’t make those balls less likely to pop out of the machine.

      You might want to avoid that combination anyway though, because lots of people do play consecutive numbers — and sharing a jackpot with a 1,000 people isn’t quite as much fun 🙂

  • Laban

    Thank you Lottery-Guy. I almost fell 4 the trick. I was looking for a “perfect software”. At least now I know the truth.

  • Martin Singh

    Hi Please can Brad Duke please make contact with me regarding business in the UK. Seeking work in US.

    Many Thanks
    Martin Singh
    +44 (0) 751 *** **49

  • John Goodman

    True winning the lottery is luck but there are ways to reduce the odds. Take for example playing the same winning numbers as last week. How many times have winning numbers from the previous week repeated. Zero. In fact, previous jackpot winning numbers may not have repeated for over 20 years. So a system that eliminates such a combination helps. Such a reduction in odds will not likely get you the jackpot but it eliminates unlikely numbers. But I still agree that lottery winning is 99.99999% luck.

    • LG

      Hi John

      Last weeks winning numbers are unlikely to be drawn this week. But mathematically only exactly as unlikely as every other combination. Just like when you roll a dice, you still have the same 1-in-6 chance of getting the same number again. So this is not actually a valid technique to reduce the odds I’m afraid.

      It actually already happened too in one game. See this blog post about the repeat lottery numbers in Bulgaria. It was literally 2 draws in a row.

  • John Goodman

    Reason why I do not believe in these so called lottery winning systems is that if I have one I will not sell it for any price. I will be too busy winning lotteries and spending the money on myself and charities that I will not be begging people to become winners by buying my system for $19.99.

  • Larry Andrews

    Don’t all lotteries use multiple sets of balls which makes it even more random? Has anyone tried to find a pattern within a certain set? Not that the lotteries let us know in advance of the drawing which set they are using.

  • Marjan Novotni

    Lottery Guy, in random events the more you repeat your experiments the closer and closer you come to the theoretical probability. If I roll a dice 6 times I should see 1,2,3,4,5,6 all appear once in theory, but of course this may not happen. But I roll that dice 1000 times, 10000000 times the closer and closer the numbers come out as 1/6! So in lotteries we should see every combination come out once at least!

    • LG

      Yes, eventually. (Although not sure what this was in response to..?)

      Although I’d slightly disagree with the ‘should’ in your dice example. ‘Could’ perhaps, but not ‘should’. 🙂

  • Rule Let

    I have always questioned lottery systems that so-call work. I have studied lots. None actually giving me more than when I started. Currently trying to create my own system.
    I’m told that every game is random. I’m a look for patterns kind a gal, and some numbers do come in more than others. I question if some of these random games are randomly rigged.

    • LG

      Hey Rule

      Sadly most lottery systems and prediction software are based on poor understanding, or bad conclusions drawn from the evidence. The sellers of the worst of which really don’t care if they work or not, because they’ve banked your money by then 🙁

      The problem with random is that sometimes it doesn’t look that way. And in a proper random system, that’s normal — because all results are possible. Can you roll three 6’s in a row with a perfectly random dice – yes. But it shouldn’t happen too often.

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