Are some lottery numbers better than others? Is there a method to picking lottery numbers?
I’ve seen more lies and misinformation on this topic than anything else.
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How To Pick Better Lottery Numbers
How To Pick Better Lottery Numbers
The argument seems valid. 1,2,3,4,5,6 has the same chance of selection as 3,22,25,35,40,45.
Supposed you need to pick 2 numbers from 1-4.
It’s easy to imagine 1,2 has the same chance as 1,4 or 2,4.
What about the certain individuals who have won the lottery several times? In Alberta, Canada, there was a certain man who was refused his winnings because it was his third win. How are they able win the lottery more than once?
Hi Brad,
It’s always luck at the end of day. You can apply good strategy to maximise your chances, but luck will always be the deciding factor.
I don’t know the story of a man being refused for winning 3 times – are you sure of the facts on this? Because to my knowledge nobody has ever been refused a prize anywhere in the world purely for winning too often. When claims are rejected it’s normally for fraud, stolen tickets or other disputes over who really owns the winning ticket.
I do remember a story about ten years ago about that happening, although I can’t seem to find it, on the Internet, there was a man in Airdrie, Alberta, Canada which is next to Calgary, won the Lottery 5 times. Is it luck or strategy or both?
That must be Seguro Ndabene. He won 4 times (between 2004 and 2009, wins ranging from $50,000 to $1M). He did have a dispute over his 5th win, but not because he kept winning – it was because another player challenged his claim to be the sole winner. It was eventually settled by the courts with the full payment of $17M going to Seguro.
Seguro says he has no system (he bought random numbers), but admits that he buys “hundreds of tickets” – which helps a lot :-). He’s also part of lottery group too, but didn’t say how many tickets they buy.
So reading between the lines, you can only imagine how much of his earlier wins he spent on more tickets (the same ‘secret formula’ which also nicely explains Richard Lustig’s wins…).
Lottery Guy, I want to know which numbers come out most often in most drawings based on your study in lottery 6 numbers game?
Do you mean based on all 6 number games around the world..? If so, I don’t have those stats — and I don’t see how they would be useful to you?
If you mean for a specific game, then there are tools to track historical results and attempt to detect any bias that may be presenting itself – my lottery strategy group membership includes one.
If I got some old lotto numbers I haven’t used in about 1 year should I play them?
There’s no reason numbers that one person hasn’t played would be any more (or less) likely as a result of not playing them. Any players decision to play or not play certain numbers has no direct effect on the draw machine.
Why isnt all lotto wheels giving me the right combination when I have added all the winning numbers in my selection.
It depends greatly on the wheel you are playing – not all wheels are created equally! If it was a full wheel then you would have the winning combination, but full wheels are expensive to play so are not used very often. Most people use wheels with a minimum win guarantee, i.e. you get a certain win level if you match a certain number of balls from your pool of numbers. It is possible to create wheels that are fairly useless, so you do need to know what you are looking for to avoid the bad ones. Have a look at Bluskov’s book (here) for some state of the art wheels.
I have to laugh at the misunderstanding above. Using the current 5/69 + 1/26 of Powerball, there are 11,238,513 unique five ball combinations. Multiplying this by the 26 numbers of the power ball gives a total of 292,201,338 unique combinations that would win a jackpot prize. The chance of any given jackpot combination being draw is 1/292201338 – a vanishingly small number. Buying more unique tickets increases the odds of of winning by n/292201338, where n is the number of tickets bought, and still a vanishingly small number for any reasonable amount of ticket purchases. There is no system memory, therefore the odds remain the same from play to play.
If you examine the number of pairs, there are 2346 unique pairs. If you want non-unique pairs there are 2346 pairs repeated 47905 times each.
If you want quadruples, there are 864,501 unique quadruples. Each unique quadruple is repeated 65 times.
Triples are a slightly different proposition. Some combinations of triples are repeated 2145 times and range down to only a single instance. Triples have a mathematical bias towards sets that start with 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5. However when divided by the number of total combinations, the probability of the highest combinations of triples – those starting with 1 – is still approaching zero (1.9 X10^4 or 1 /5239.4).
Hi ! I agree that there are useless sets of numbers in a wheel because to play the probabilities there are a lot of combinations outside the norm. So some games in a wheel can be eliminated. Sure you could miss in one draw but we play the probability over a series of draws. I know because I use a lot of factors that help me lower the cost of a wheel.
Hi Desmond, you should not filter out any combination from a wheel. It might be the jackpot combination. You can save money by playing optimized wheels by Bluskov, or Lotto Logix.
Hi there, in a lotto game say 1 to 50 numbers. There are low/high numbers from 1 to 25, and 25 to 50. Avoid choosing only high numbers as it’s very rare for 6 high numbers or 6 low numbers to come up.
Choose 3 low and 3 high, 2 low 4 high, 4 low and 2 high combinations and also discard 1 low 5 high and 5 low 1 high. Play lotto with less numbers say 6 from 25 or 38 and 40. Cheers
Sorry Daryl but this is actually a myth. Unfortunately choosing high/low numbers in this way makes no difference at all.
All combinations are ‘very rare’, because there are millions of them (over 15 million in a 6 from 50 game) – and only a few thousand draws have ever been made in even the longest running games.
Playing games with less numbers will of course help though 🙂