Developer's Blog

I keep getting asked why LSA wont update.

I try very hard to maintain the draw result databases, I use a company to supply the US and UK draw data however the rest of the draws I update manually, this as you can well imagine is very time consuming and not always possible each week with my schedule.

When I designed the database format for LSA I designed it with the user in mind, no hidden or encrypted database files, the databases are stored in a plain text file which can simple be edited using any text editor such as windows Notepad. This approach allows users to update a database files if needed. God forbid if anything should happen to my company or to me and the updates stopped the software would still be usable.

 

UAC, User Account Control

A security feature built in to Windows Vista, Windows 7 and now Windows 8

This feature runs in the background on your computer, it can be switched off but not recommended, it prevents software writing to your hard disk without permission from an administrator. Even if you are the Administrator you must still let Windows know your happy for a piece of software to write to the hard disk. Most software by default does not have this permission so you have to run the software as an administrator.

 

Update issues

If your having update issues this is the most common cause and you should read the following help section of my website

http://www.lsa-lottery-software.com/How_to_Run_LSA_as_an_Administrator.htm

 

Update a draw manually

If you want to update a draw manually or just know the file format then read the following help section of my website

http://www.lsa-lottery-software.com/Update_Draws_Manually.htm

 

New draws

If you know of a draw I don't cover then email me using the support page in LSA, providing the name and website of the draw and I will make the database file for you.

After much research I am going to share some very interesting findings with regards to my "Ball Placement Probability theory ©".

 

I am listening to snow patrols new album while writing this, its excellent, Called Out In the Dark is a really good track, anyway to the research.

Its long been my belief that I could get a computer to analyse any set of combinations from any pool / pick lottery providing real odds on the entire draw. LSA is an excellent example of single number ball placement probability theory however the goal was to produce an algorithm that could be applied to any combination of numbers be it sets of 2,3,4,5 or even 6 balls , the problem is that there are billions of combinations and no software can handle such massive amounts of data in a fast enough time to make a viable consumer app.

Well I am excited to announce after running my quad core PC 24 hours a day for a little over 2 years with custom software I wrote I have completed this mammoth task.

I will use the world's most favourite draw to show this example 6/49

I can now put proof to my theory that 

A: The way you place the numbers on a single line (ticket) effects your chances of a win in the whole pool.

B: The way you place the numbers on multiple tickets can amplify your chances of a win from the entire pool.

Example using the 4 numbers 01 10 20 30

In the 6/49 you have to pick 6 numbers on 1 line, now with my new research I am able to find where to put numbers on a ticket to maximize win coverage, and what numbers work best.

Ball 1	Ball 2	Ball 3	Ball 4	Ball 5	Ball 6	6 Ball Combos Covered
1	10	20	30	?	?	171
1	10	20	?	?	30	36
1	10	20	?	30	?	171
1	?	10	20	30	?	152
1	?	10	?	20	30	72

Above shows that

01 10 20 30 ? ?

is better than

01 10 20 ? ? 30

In fact by just moving the positions of the numbers on the same line the odds have been reduced giving 135 less possible chances of a win using 01 10 20 _ _ 30

Now let's look at possible 3 ball combinations in the 6/49

 

Ball 1	Ball 2	Ball 3	Ball 4	Ball 5	Ball 6	6 Ball Combos Covered
01	10	20				3,654
01	10		20			3,654
01	10			20		1,044
01	10				20	84
01		10	20			3,248
01		10		20		2,088
01		10			20	288
01			10	20		812
01			10		20	252
01				10	20	52

 

It can be seen from the above chart that placing the numbers 01 10 and 20 in position

01 10 20 _ _ _ or

01 10 _ 20 _ _ you will win if any one of 3,654 combinations appear where as putting them on a ticket in the following order 01 _ 10 _ _ 20 you can only win from 288 combinations from the 13,983,816 possible.

My task is now to analyse all possible variations and find the best numbers to play.

05 15 25 _ _ _ = You win if any one of 2,024 combinations appear from 13,983,816

04 12 23 _ _ _= You win if any one of 2,600 combinations appear from 13,983,816

02 08 26 _ _ _= You win if any one of 1,771 combinations appear from 13,983,816

02 08 _ 26 _ _ = You win if any one of 4,301 combinations appear from 13,983,816

02 08 _ 30 _ _ = You win if any one of 3,591 combinations appear from 13,983,816

02 _ 08 _ 30 _ = You win if any one of 855 combinations appear from 13,983,816

The above are just random numbers typed in to see what ball placement probability they have.

Now what's really exciting is you have 3 spaces left so you can double up on the above coverage.

 

05 15 25 _ _ _ = You win if any one of 2,024 combinations appear from 13,983,816

_ _ _ 29 38 45 = You win if any one of 3,276 combinations appear from 13,983,816

 

So 05 15 25 29 38 45 = 2,024 + 3,276 = 5,300 lines that can appear that will give you a win with this ticket, it gets better. There are 20 ways to arrange 3 balls in 6 balls 15 ways to arrange 4 and 6 ways to arrang 5 from 6.

So doing the math for them all I can put a ranking system in place.

Then from this ranking system I can make wheels.

Using this system to balance all 3,4,5 combinations I can realise my goal of finding the mathematically perfect wheel for this draw.

I will be putting numbers on the lotto this week using this new system.

If your a user of LSA then you can see the power of knowing single number placement proberbility so you can appriciate the power of any set of combnations being able to do the same.

Thank you for reading, any feedback or comments are most welcome.

Jamie

I am trying out the video feature of the LP blog

I know the quality is low but you can see the simple steps of loading a draw in to LSA

No sound with this one.

 

I am impressed, the video works

I will start putting up some more.

If you would like a how to on LSA PM me with what you would like to know and I will post the video

Hi, continuing with my coverage of the reports found in LSA today I am going to cover the LAST OUT report, this report and graph provide information and statistics on the last numbers to appear.

 

For this demonstration I will be using the UK's Plus 5 - 6/49 draw, but this will work with any draw in LSA. This draw has 13,983,816 combinations so just a few combinations there to choose from.

The primary aim of this report is to show the user how many draws have occurred since each ball last appeared, I am going to show you how to use this report along with another report to find the next best number for ball position 1, but first a quick insight into the graph.

Using LSA's Last Out report

 

The graph in the above image is filtered on ball 1, which clearly shows a bias toward the lower range of the graph.

Quick Information you should know:

• The bars in the graph represent the number of draws past without a show for each ball.
• Higher bars mean less appearances over time, hence less likely.
• Bars at 0 mean the number last appeared in the last draw.

Example of usage:

• In LSA select the options Counts - Last Out
• By default Ball 1 is selected so leave as is for now.
• Click the report button
• Move the report that opens aside, leaving it open as you will need this in a moment.
• Click the menuReports - Global Reports - True Hot Warm Cold
• Now align top and bottom on your screen theTrue Hot Warm Coldand theLast Outreports as in the picture below.

 

Above are two samples one from each graph which I will refer to as A and B from now on.

Pen and paper might be a good idea or Excel if you have it would be great for this.

We want to see the likelihood of each number appearing in the next draw.

This is how.......

Using ball position one

Ball 1

• (A) shows ball 1 was drawn 1 draw ago,
• (B) says ball 1 appears every 8 draws.
• So this one is simple ball one mathematically will appear in 7 draws time.
• 8 - 1 = 7

Ball 2

• (A) shows ball 2 was drawn 5 draws ago
• (B) say ball 2 appears every 9 draws in position 1.
• (B) say ball 2 appears every 78 draws in position 2
• Now this gets a little more involved
• Calculate when ball 2 is due to appear as ball position 1
  • 9 - 5 = 4 : Ball 2 is due to appear in position 1 in 4 draws time
  • Calculate when ball 2 is due to appear as ball position 1
  • Number 2 was last seen 05 draws ago as ball position 1
  • 9 - 5 = 4 : Ball 2 is due to appear in position 1 in 4 draws time
  • Repeat for 10 to 15 draws to get a results like the following
  • 
  • Ok 6 is enough for this demo, from this it can be seen that ball 6 is most likely to appear
  • Now you understand how to find the mathematical best picks repeat for ball position 2, 3 ,4 etc
  • Join the sums of the positions A and b for each set to see the best candidate globally

I know this can take some time but it's well worth the effort, I say this because I have had another user report a large win a few weeks ago and after some urging on my part this is how he told me he found the numbers that hit 5 of 6.

  Good luck 

More tomorrow

Hi all

I must apologise if you have tried contacting me in the past 10 days, you would not have had a reply.

A phone line was damaged across the fields from my office which subsequently took out my internet connection.

I logged over 18 hours of support calls and had 3 engineer visits and now finally, after 10 days I have internet again. BT use Indian call centres for support, so if you have a problem with the internet here in the UK you have to speak with someone in an India call centre, the problem with this is every time I phoned they would just read through the same script again and again asking me to switch of the router, unplug phones etc, no matter how hard I tried to explain the fault was not with my equipment they just kept saying you need to check this or we can't proceed, I spent hours on the phone not getting anywhere with the problem, they arranged an engineer visit that never happened, they arranged for a new router that has never arrived.

I work with Indians on a day to day bases, they are intelligent and very hardworking people, but BT have major fallings here, they don't provide these call centres the tools to do their job, and it appears the call centres cant deviate from a predefined script. I am very ignored about this service and although I have been told I will be getting compensation for the down time the damage this has done to business will take months to fix, I am going to stop now as it's not the place to rant on about this......but needless to say I am not happy about this.

If you have tried contacting me in the past 10 days please be patient, I now have a backlog of over 800 emails. I am working through them in the order they arrived.

Thank you

Jamie

Just a quick update to say I have not abandoned this blog, a lot more is to come.

For users of LSA I have listened and have been very busy rewriting the wheels window.

It is looking very good and I am already playing draws with the results.

The new window now has per ball position filters,

what this means is the wheel now can contain a mixture of various statistics found in LSA such as ball 1 distribution and ball 2 last out etc

See the image for the 80% complete new look.

 

 

Keep playing, good luck and more to come soon.

Ball Placement Probability© = the art of placing numbers on a ticket to maximize the hit ratio possibility

Wheeling is a favourite pass time for a lot of lottery players, (or maybe it's just me).

What many players of wheels fail to realize is that choosing the wheel to play is actually just as important as choosing the numbers in the wheel (50/50 ratio).

A report called Ball Placement Probability found in LSA was designed specifically to highlight this and provide a valuable cross reference to number placements.

I personally don't like reduced wheels as they reduce the odds, I would play an MNA any day over a reduced wheel but for this example I will run with a reduced wheel as I know a lot of you do play these wheels.

Lets pick 9 random numbers to use in a wheel

07 09 11 13 19 22 27 37 49

I can tell you that the smallest reduced wheel possible for this is 7 tickets as follows

01      02      03      04      05      07

01      02      06      07      08      09

01      03      06      07      08      09

01      04      05      06      08      09

02      03      04      05      06      09

02      03      04      05      07      08

04      05      06      07      08      09

 

Adding the numbers I randomly selected to the wheel it becomes

07      09      11      13      19      27

07      09      22      27      37      49

07      11      22      27      37      49

07      13      19      22      37      49

09      11      13      19      22      49

09      11      13      19      27      37

13      19      22      27      37      49

 

Is this a good wheel, the wheels stats say its probably as good as a reduced wheel gets

 

3 Ball Hits = 84 of 140 possible from 7 tickets: 60.00%

4 Ball Hits = 85 of 105 possible from 7 tickets: 80.95%

5 Ball Hits = 39 of 42 possible from 7 tickets: 92.86%

6 Ball Hits = 7 of 7 possible from 7 tickets: 100.00%

 

Ways to win = 215 of 294 possible from 7 tickets:

Ways to win percentage = 73%

 

3 Ball combos covered in 9 balls = 84 / 84 combos: 100.00%

4 Ball combos covered in 9 balls = 85 / 126 combos: 67.46%

5 Ball combos covered in 9 balls = 39 / 126 combos: 30.95%

6 Ball combos covered in 9 balls = 7 /84 combos: 8.33%

 

Ways to win = 215 of 420 winning combinations in 9 numbers

Ways to win percentage = 51.19%

 

 

Ok, let's now take a look at how likely these numbers in this wheel will appear.

Open up the ball placement probability report in LSA

 

The first line of the generated reduced wheel 07 09 11 13 19 27

 

07 = 49.68% (Good)
09 = 42.27% (Good)
11 = 22.17% (Avg)
13 = 8.09% (Bad)
19 = 5.39% (Bad)
27 = 3.84% (Bad)

 

Straight away it can be seen that the odds of this combination appearing in this order is unlikely

How do we correct this?, well that's the challenging part, changing the numbers selected in the wheel can easily make line 1 very good but to what effect on the other lines.

 

A great wheel will not only be balanced, but have good ball positioning so numbers entered hit high probability ball positions, this opens up a whole new genre of wheeling not considered before.

 

Choose your numbers, choose your wheel then reference the chances you have of that combination appearing, repeat and repeat, don't use past draw history, the samples are just too small to be considered a good reliable statistic, use global findings to pick the numbers. It's a balancing act but if pulled off will give you the best wheels on the planet.

In this blog post I am going to be talking about  interpreting the data found on LSA's reports

There are many powerful reports in LSA and I am going to blog each one over the next few weeks simply explaining the thought behind making each report and how to get the most from them.

I am going to start with one of my favourites, one I find myself using not only for choosing numbers to play but also referencing to prove theories while developing LSA.

The True Hot, Warm and Cold report.

This report is split into two areas of data

The top half of the report shows you how many draws pass before a number becomes due to appear.

This statistic is a global fact and not effected by past draws, its calculated from every possible combination in the draw your playing. 

So that you better understand the global report look at Ball 5 position 5 with a value of 2,118,760

This means that ball 5 will appear in position 5 once every 2,118,760 draws, which happens to be the total combinations availible in this draw - The EuroMillions

This one is easy to prove as only one combination can have ball 5 as a 5th ball position and that combination is 1 2 3 4 5, so the odds are 1 in 2,118,760 to hit 1 2 3 4 5.

If you add any 5 together one from each position you will see the period of that combinations appearence in the EuroMillions

1 12 27 36 50 = 92 draws to appear 

whereas

46 47 48 49 50 = 2,166,913 draws to appear 

Theses values represent draws, its not saying in the Euromillions 1 12 27 36 50 will appear once every 92 draws, what it is saying is that in the EuroMillions on average

over a 92 draw period each of the numbers from 1 12 27 36 50 will have appeared in each position at least once.

I can almost sense your brains ticking away now, yes you can choose 3 numbers, hence reduce the field and get a acurate hit 3 period range.

 

Upto this point this is all global, no past draw data is used so it is a golden reference template for this draw (never changes )

 

The second half of the report shows when the number is due

This is done by taking the global due value as shown in the top half of the report and subtracting the average appearances of each ball to date.

You can see in the top part of this report that ball 1 will appear in position 1 once every 10 draws

This matches the global value in the second half of the report, this simply means ball 1 appeared as the lowest ball in the last draw and is not due for 10 draws.

However ball 2 is due to appear, the global findings (from LSA's Last Ball Out Report)  tell us ball 2 appeared as the lowest ball 40 draws ago.

We know globally ball 2 will appear in position 2 once every 11 draws so 11 - 40 = -29

Statistically ball 2 as a lowest ball is now well overdue and should be considered a hot number.

All other hot warm and cold systems I have seen purely use past draws for findings.

Using every combination possible gives a much more statistically accurate picture of the draws current state

The calculations involved in this report would take days to create by hand.

LSA produces the report in under a second.

Whatever draw you play in whatever country you play it in, however you choose to pick your numbers the one thing that remains true,

If you bet 1 ticket you get 1 chance of winning the jackpot

If bet 1000 tickets then you have 1000 chances of winning the jackpot.

Don't believe anyone that tells you they have a system that can help you win the jackpot, they don't

Every single combination in the lottery has just the same chance as appearing as any other

1 2 3 4 5 6 has the same chance as last week's UK Lotto result 01 14 18 24 26 28

Let me show you how we can tip the odds on smaller prizes and very efficiently too.

Below is a report from LSA showing the normal distribution of the UK lotto, this is not past draw data,

its calculated from the entire set of combinations possible in the draw and as such never changes.

From the report it can be seen that ball 1 appears 1,712,304 times in position 1 , this means if you counted every combination

in the 13,983,816 possible combinations available you would find that ball 1 appears 1,712,304 times as the lowest ball.

We know that there are 13,983,816 possible combinations available so it's simple a matter of

13,983,816 / 1,712,304 = to find the average appearance of ball one throughout the history of the draw.

So in any 6/49 draw in the world you will see that ball 1 will appear on average once every 8.1666 draws, fact and can never change

Do this for each number and LSA knows when each number is due, count the hits in past draw results and LSA is able to work out when each number will(should) appear.

This is why LSA takes a layered approach to analysing draws, each ball starts life with its own set of statistics, every ball is unique and has different properties.

LSA uses these properties to help predict the next draw.

Let me show you another, let's take ball 10 position 2, it appears 740,259 times as a second ball in 13,983,816 combinations

13,983,816 / 740,259 = 18.890 so in a 6/49 draw we know that on average every 19 draws we will see ball 10 appear as the second lowest ball

Really listen when I say this information is gold

Study the reports in LSA, the global report - True, Hot, warm and cold  does all the math for you and even subtracts the current appearance

of each ball showing you when to start putting on the real due numbers.

This is the way forward to win lotteries...........

 

 

 

 

This style of lottery analysis is copyright protected and not to be used commercially anywhere without my full written permission

A very popular question I get asked is "how can I use LOWESS to help predict my numbers?".

Firstly you must understand that LSA uses a layered architecture, it does not see a draw as a group of numbers but instead sees the draw as a set of individual numbers. LSA analysis's draws in this way, this means if you have a pick 6 lotto you have to create 6 LOWESS graphs to get one prediction, one for each ball.

Keeping that in mind let me move on to using LOWESS.

The more past draw results used in LOWESS the more averaged the plots become, hence the more average the prediction become..

8 to 15 draws should provide plenty of variation in the predictions from one draw to the next.

Smoothness

When using LOWESS you should be changing this all the time finding the best fit plot line for the number of past draws your using.

When setting smoothness, watch the trend line, you don't want it touching each ball as in the image below

but then you don't want the line too straight either.

 

The best curve is a best fit curve as in the image below

 

Not too sharp and not too smooth.

As you alter settings look to the text pain to see what the predictions are doing.

The values in here should be treated as follows

Min: LSA predicted the next ball wont fall below the min value

Max: LSA predicted the next ball wont fall above the max value

That means LSA predicts the ball will be in between that range

It gives two predictions for this

Avg and Med - Choose the one you feel most happy with or choose a value in between them.

Always track the predictions and after a few weeks you will see what the variations are from prediction to draw and adjust accordingly

If used correctly this is a very powerful tool with a higher than average hit rate.