Quote: Originally posted by PeerGynt on Sep 15, 2014
What would the "Holy Grail" of playing the Pick 3 game look like?...
Unless the game is completely corrupt (which it's not), it's not "knowing the winning number in advance," because that's literally impossible. But unless you believe the games (i.e., that aren't run off falling balls) are just randomly picking any number from 000-999 using no factors whatsoever… there has to be a reduced pool of numbers at work in any given play. And we here on lp all use filters to sift whatever pools we've improvised for our winning selections.
So we have two tools at our disposal: pools, and filters.
A filter isn't a pool, though often it looks like one. A "due sum," for example, isn't a pool, because there's no guarantee a due sum is coming in X number of plays.
A pool is: A reduced set of numbers that are guaranteed within X number of plays to pay off.
The only immediately guaranteed pool of numbers I know, is the pool of one thousand numbers. Too big. So we reduce it.
You can, say, reduce it by half. That's still 500 numbers. One can measure the pay-off rate, and then create a formula for that pool. But that pool is much too large for feasibility.
But here's one guaranteed, dramatically reduced pool: playing boxes. The pool of 120 singles boxes reduces the overall pool, and guarantees pay-off within (most of the time) one or two plays max. Again, though, it's too large for our normal use, not to mention profitability. So we filter those 120 boxes down.
The Holy Grail, then, still wouldn't be ever finer filters applied to this 120 box pool - because filters can never take the place of a guaranteed pool.
The Holy Grail of number sets - our working pools - would have to then have two elements: (1) Be reduced to a manageable amount, and (2) guaranteed to pay off within manageable amounts of plays.
But what is "manageable"? Debatable. But I'd venture to say... speaking in terms of singles boxes only now...
If one could discover (a) a pool of numbers somewhere between 10-20; that (b) was guaranteed to pay off within 10 plays (with, ideally, the bulk of such payoffs being less than about 1/2 that amount, i.e., < five to six plays consistently); and, as difficult as those two alone are, the necessary piéce de résistance: (c) If this pool could be calculated before any filter was ever applied to it.
... then that would indeed be the Holy Grail of the Pick 3 game. Right?