Let's start with the good news: You are about to win $500. No, it's not 100 percent certain, but frankly, it looks pretty darn good. All you need to do is drive to New York, buy a lottery ticket and play the number 686. Hello 500 smackeroos! It's basically a lock and you want to know why? Well, Roy Siano is glad you asked.

"Double sixes are our best bet for the next issue," he says.

That would be the next issue of 3 + 4 Digit Lotto Stats, one of two biweekly publications owned, edited and published by Siano and his business partner for the past five years, Stephen Allensworth. Each issue of Lotto Stats and its sister magazine, Lotto News, purport to do what any mathematician will tell you cannot be done: teach you how to win the lottery.

For $2.95 per issue, you get 32 black-and-white pages stuffed with reams of data, dozens of charts and erudite-sounding advice from a handful of columnists, each offering strategies to gamble your way to Fat City courtesy of the New York lottery. Plenty of these columns come off as — what's the polite phrase here? — utterly amamie. Readers in a recent issue who saw a door in their REM sleep, for instance, were advised to play 271. Why? Unclear.

But that's the more fanciful stuff. Siano and Allensworth claim that solid logic undergirds the "hit frequency charts" and "pattern tables" crammed into their magazines. It boils down to this: If you flip a coin nine times and it keeps coming up heads, what should you bet will happen in the next flip?

"Tails, of course," says Siano, sitting in Allensworth's apartment in Port Chester, a suburb of New York near the Connecticut border.

"We use gambler's math," says Allensworth. "What it does is track events. Sometimes numbers are out for a long time," which is to say, they fail to show up in winning combinations. "Generally speaking, after they've been out for a while, they tend to make up lost ground."

Of course, the world is filled with geeks who find this "logic" laughable. Oh, they'll tell you that no matter how many tails in a row you get from a coin, the odds are still 50-50 with each new flip. The misimpression that a head is more likely after a string of tails, these so-called experts will tell you, even has a name. It's called the gambler's fallacy.