Budget being the top concern. Setting it at $14 per week keeps it fun. I can play a variety of games at that budget...

Pick 3 mid day AND evening

Or

Pick 5 mid day AND evening

Or

Match 6

Or

Cash 5 (though I do not play this one)

The system being developed is based on frequency observation.

The 2 phases take it from 1,000 possible combinations I can pick from and narrow it down to 1.

Phase one is interesting, but results in too many combos... today's output shows 6 digits with a frequency falling within the inter quartile range, therefore neutral. So from 1,000 (10x10x10) choices, I reduce it to 216 (6x6x6) by cutting the hots and colds as outliers. Keep in mind that there is almost a 95% chance that at least one of those combos will appear straight in the next 21 draws... that was proven out by a full back test against the histories of both PA pick 3 mid and eve games.

The phase 2 currently being  used is to sort the results by frequency, which lines up 6 combos for selection. Now, 6 is not unreasonable, but the budget @ $14 per week says otherwise. 

So, my selection involves looking at the middle of that pack... since it is an even number of neutral combos, this puts the focus on combos 3 and 4. Even better to have just 2 combos, but to resolve the budget, I must pick one and reject the other. For this I take the sum of the draws out statistic for each position, lowest wins.

On the paper play test that just concluded, it worked for the 690 in the mid day, but failed for the 537 in the evening.

So at the end of the day, I am still making a best guess with 1:1,000 odds.

The selection strategy will change for phase 2 each 21 day cycle, but the process is simple... make a best guess given the information available.

So in my mind, I know that my final pick is at raw odds, but I truly feel I have done everything I can possibly do to catch a hit. There is no magic function that will deliver a hit on demand. There will be more losing cycles that winning ones, and regardless of how I tweak the process each cycle, there will be zero guarantees.

But this process has hit, and seems like the best bet for me to continue. The same dumb luck that brought the 690 in the paper play test could easily work for the bigger games (pick 5 and Match 6) in the full cycle. There is no guarantee that you win, but it is also not fully guaranteed that you will lose (likely, but not an absolute guarantee).

My best guess engine will keep me busy and interested for the remainder of the year and across ALL of 2026. I even dropped the 50 cent box from the pick 3 this week in favor of the full $1 straight. This should be fun because now just 2 $500 hits on pick 3 will not only fund the remainder of 2025, but ALL of 2026. I should probably drop the match 6 and just go all in on the pick 3 for these last 11 weeks of the year. I will start 2026 with the 3rd week of the 4th cycle on pick 3 and start Match 6 in the second week of January... that seems a solid plan.

It is important to consider the budget if you want to properly allocate wins... IF there are 2 straight pick 3 hits, play is on the house for the whole year in 2026 AND covered for the rest of this year. Since one of the goals is to have the state pay for attempts at the Cash 4 Life, that means any $500 hit after the next 2 can both accomplish that mission AND generate a profit.

When I was updating the draw files, just for fun I implemented the sorting into the Match 6 script and after adjusting a minor "index out of range" error, it worked exactly as I thought it might. Next coding task is to spin those changes into the Cash 4 Life script, which I hope gets at least one chance to run over the next 63 weeks...