Someone posted on one of the threads with words something along these lines:

The lottery authorities know some people know how to work the numbers and predict outcomes, and it's their worst nightmare.

That might be true.  Certainly some people know how to recognize the patterns in the draws and do workups on the numbers.  That process takes a long time to discover, maybe never gets completely discovered, but is surprisingly easy.

I'm still a novice on all this, though I've put a lot of time into it and continue to learn more every draw.  On yesterday's PB draw I began with a 23 number long list I'd distilled using the methods described in loving detail on this blog.    I'm still experimenting, digging in the histories for ways to get them down into a smaller set, so I worked longer, got them down to 13 numbers, which I bought 13 tickets for.

The long list had all five whites that hit.  The short list I finally bought tickets for had only two.  I have a long way to go before I'm the worst nightmare of any lottery management.

But as to the statement by the poster on the thread...... I've been watching the predictions a bit, watching the MM Challenge by Maddog.  3-0 was the best for the last draw, even though the people competing were posting a lot of numbers.  Which leads me to believe I'm not alone in not being the worst nightmare of anyone.

Seems to me the difficult part is going back after the draw to try to figure out where you went wrong (you being me).  Trying to find the places where the numbers drawn were the previous day, backchecking on whether they'd have been there the previous days of previous draws, discarding the places they weren't, searching for new places they might be, backchecking those.

Now, THAT might qualify as someone's worst nightmare, but it isn't the lottery officials.

I've had some health problems that have kept me from being as physically active this year as I usually am.  That's given me an opportunity to really do a lot of digging in number behavior in ways I believe few people would ever have the time to do.  About the only conclusion I've come to is that the numbers definitely do behave in a completely non-random way, completely across the spectrum of lotteries.  If they behave in a way that allows for predicting four or five out of six in a pool of 15 or 20, there's almost certainly a system at work that only needs deeper examination and understanding to allow it to be predicted a lot more precisely.

But we at LP aren't there yet.  If someone is, he's keeping such a low profile the lottery authorities haven't yet thought to have nightmares about him.

Meanwhile, I think I read somewhere that PB matrix change was going to happen after last night's draw..... checked the 'About' section on PB and didn't see anything mentioning it, so maybe it's been stalled.

Blog readers, I hope one of you becomes the worst nightmare of the lottery authorities.  I believe it can be done, and I believe if one of us can't do it, we aren't half the men (and women) I think we are. 

I've been a nightmare or two in the past, but I'm losing my faith I'm going to get to be this one.

Jack

Edited in afterthought:

There's no reason whatever any opinion I hold ought to carry any weight with anyone.  I've been wrong enough times in this life to hold the world title nobody's likely to take away.  The attrition rate among the competition's just too high.

But having said that, if I were making suggestions, which I am not, I'd suggest not allowing yourselves to draw boundaries around what you're trying to do.  Don't keep running down the same path when it doesn't do what you're after.  Chalk up the parts that work, throw away those that don't, and find some roads not yet taken.  I'm convinced there are a lot of them.