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I
have been playing the UK Lottery regularly since it started in 1994.
Like most of you out there I’ve got very little to show for it; about fifteen
£10 wins and two 4 ball wins (£40 & £82). I’ve always played more
than 1 line and for the past 4 years I have been playing 7 lines every Saturday
(I only played the Wednesday draw when there was a roll-over). Over the
last year I have started playing the Euro Millions Lottery, not always, but
definitely when there is a roll-over.
I’ve often come across the information that a large number of people use 1, 2,
3, 4, 5 & 6 as a Lotto entry. I always intuitively felt that this was
very stupid but could never properly reason why. After all, every
combination has an equal chance of winning, right – WRONG. My wife often
says to me, ‘why do you play so many lines, you only need 1 to win’.
Try, as I did, to convince her that ‘obviously if you play more lines you must
have a better chance’, she remained unconvinced. I used to wonder how
she could not understand. I think I now understand where she is coming
from. You see, mathematically, the chance of you winning the UK Lottery is
so small that if you play 1, 5, 10 or 20 lines the chance is remains incredibly
small – unless to do something smart to improve the odds in your favour.
About 3 months ago, while having real financial problems, I started to seriously
consider giving up playing the Lotto in order to save £7-£10 a week. Or, at
least cut it down to one entry, because ‘if you aren’t in it you can’t win
it’. In order to justify my continued spending I decided to
investigate if there was any way of improving the chance
of winning in your favour.
There were 1137 results so I had to use formulas to start analysing data.
Fortunately I am quite accomplished at analysing data on a spreadsheet. It
became apparent very quickly that there were patterns. I could see that
there had never been a win
involving 4, 5 or 6 consecutive numbers. So, my feeling was correct,
paying £1 to play 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 & 6 was a complete waste of time. OK,
so that is 1 of the 14 Million combinations that I don’t have to worry about.
Actually all combinations containing 4, 5 or 6 sequential numbers have
effectively been eliminated. To put this in perspective, such combinations
will occur sometime in the future but just not very often compared to other
patterns of 6 numbers.
My analyses continued. I was amazed
to find that there had never been a jackpot win starting with a lowest number
greater than 30. I even re-checked the original results set in case I had
‘lost’ some results. No it was true. Gosh, I’ve now eliminated
all number sets that have their lowest number greater than 30. Wow, that
knocked a ‘lotto’ of number sets out (couldn’t resist that). And my
analyses continued…….
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A
winning combination has never been repeated.
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Never
contained 4, 5 or 6 consecutive numbers. Only 49 (4.3%) have contained
3 consecutive numbers.
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Conversely,
2 consecutive numbers was relatively common.
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Most
have 1 as their lowest number. 1 in every 8 jackpots in fact (12%).
1 in 9 (11%) Jackpots have had 2 as the lowest number. 1 in 11 Jackpots (9%)
have had 3 or 4 as the lowest number. 1 in every 14 (7%) has had 5, 6 or 7
as the lowest number. Only 1 in approximately every 568 jackpots (>0.3%)
have had 27, 28, 29 or 30 as the lowest number. I personally found
this result amazing and totally unexpected
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There
has never been a win with a lowest number greater than 30.
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There
has never been a win with the highest number lower than 16.
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Most
wins have the highest number greater than 31.
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Most
wins have 47, 48 or 49 as the highest number played. This is
absolutely amazing because this means most wins have had either 1, 2 or 3 as
the lowest number OR 47, 48 or 49 as the highest.
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I
was very careful to use the word ‘OR’ in the statement above. If
you look at the number of wins containing either, 1, 2, 3, 4 AND either 44,
45, 46, 47, 48 or 49 then there were a total of 261 wins (23%). Wow!
This is more than 1 in 5 (20%). |
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In
any draw the 2nd lowest number most likely to occur is between 5 and 18, the
3rd most likely between 18 and 28, the 4th between 28 and 33, the 5th most
likely between 34 and 43 and the highest number drawn is most like likely
between 47 and 49. From the above a good set of numbers might be 2, 10, 19,
30, 37 and 48 (this set has never won). |
The analysis is still continuing. If anyone can
tell me how to model a six dimensional graph, that would be cool.
If you do an internet search on lottery number picking
systems you will find one that involves picking numbers for the next eight draws
based on the previous 8 draws. I trialed this system. This involved
playing 15 lines, using a combination of ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ numbers from
the previous 8 draws. I then applied the rules above to make my final
selections. One week I would have got 4 lines of 3 giving me £40 for the
£15 spent. So there is some potential with this. I’ll look into
it further.
GOOD LUCK
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