Look for the fourth ball to repeat itself from the previous drawing soon. Also, ball 1-ball 2 is overdue to be consecutive (i.e. first ball is 13, second ball is 14, etc).

In about 3 or four drawings hence, the Mega ball will be due to repeat from the previous drawing.

Actually in the last 328 MegaMillions drawings since the last matrix change, the bonus number has only repeated in the next drawing seven times, so that's 7/328 or about 1/47.

 06/17/08   05 14 25 47 49     36  7
 06/13/08   08 09 14 38 44     36 

 05/06/08   04 21 46 53 54     26  6
 05/02/08   08 28 37 53 55     26  5
 04/29/08   19 24 35 44 51     26 

 06/15/07   01 05 16 26 30     21  4
 06/12/07   03 13 19 31 50     21 

 02/16/07   17 35 40 46 48     41  3
 02/13/07   03 09 24 29 41     41  2
 02/09/07   32 39 46 48 49     41 

 05/23/06   17 21 28 48 54     01  1
 05/19/06   05 12 31 51 56     01

Also in the last 328 drawings  207 of the drawings had none of the 5 core numbers from the previous drawings, 105 had one number, 14 has two and 1 had three.

Even if we were *sure* to know what the 4th ball will be, odds would still be 1 in 15,688,530 to get the rest.

There are only 3,819,816  possible combinations of 5 in a pool of 56 numbers. If you use the numbers from the last drawing as a key number one at a time then there are  1,249,500 possible combinations of 5.  Choosing the right Mega ball make the task of winning the jackpot 46 times harder.

Judging by that, it doesn't look like it will do it again for the rest of the year., unless there were more in '07.

Everything Jimhowlett predicts will happen probably several times before the end of the year, it just not specific enough to predict it will all happen tonight.  When I pick my combinations for tonight's drawing I will pick ones with profiles similar to 70% of previous winning numbers but have never matched more 3of5 of them.

I should probably have been more specific but I meant there is a good chance it would repeat last night (aka, it is overdue). We must remember the lottery listens to no one. Nothing is set in stone until after the fact.

Still, I wont $10 on this play (playing $5) with my new system so I'm happy.

Jim, as you surmised, the lottery listens to no one.

I have charted (PB) where we had a repeat number in 48 out of 100 games - nearly 50% - then it slowly dwindled to 12%, and I'm not even sure where it is today...    46 out of the last 100 games, so it's going back up, BUT over the last 12 games, we have had 4 repeat numbers - including two in one game, so it's more like 3/12, 25%, so maybe it's cooling off ???

That's why it is essential that you adjust your tracking system to the trends. For example, for MegaMillions, I keep track of the past 50 drawings. That's about 6 months. That is my sample from where I look at my patterns. Anything beyond that I consider outdated and possibly a skew. Sometimes too much information is too much information and you want to create a window of relevance instead of looking at the entire picture. So once I start to accumulate more than 50 drawings on my spreadsheet, I start to move the older drawings to an archive database then delete them on the main database I use to run my algorithms.

I've found that by picking my pool of numbers to play from the last fifty drawings yields a considerably higher percentage of hits than by taking into account the entire history of the MegaMillions drawings dating back to the beginning of the last format (i.e. 5/56 + 1/46).

My data base with 1173 records has both the old BigGame and MegaMillion results.  If I just want to use the MM data since the last matrix change I limit my search to the last 329 records.  If I just want to use the most recent records that have all 56 numbers I limit my search to the last 34 records.  What ever history of the game I want to compare, it's all there at my finger tips.  Since no combination of five have repeated during the entire history of the game, I check my picks using the whole data base.