Don't feel bad sometimes the winning solution doesn't reveal itself until it happens.

I think alot of it is psychological... For some strange reason it's just not the same as losing on 5 tickets as it is on 1... I should be extatic because I am down to the one pick finally, but when you are off, you are WAY off... when I played a $5 strip, I would not use powerplay... occasionally I would match the PB because I generally played one from each decade... now it's all or nothing... so far the returns have been minimal (although it IS nice when you just match the PB and the powerplay is a 5).

the thing with excel is that I cannot even trick myself into thinking I have a winning system because I have the backtest results right in my face... the best backtest result I gained AFTER_THE_FACT was a $5000 match, and with dynamic error correction, even that disappeared.
I do believe my mechanism is correct, I just have the wrong components in it... after all, it does do error correction masks automatically, counts past hits and can eeasily be altered... stats may not be the best transforms to use, but I have no viable alternative at the moment.

Can you set up different scenarios with different components to see which way works best then alter your components to reflect the new findings. I think that you are almost there in terms of finding a solution and hope you find the pre cursor to solve it. With your experience using excel I'm sure you will find the correct method to pull it off. If only through trial and error sooner or later you will hit the sweet spot in the program you created. As with any system that has a possible way to win sooner or later it should give some exciting results. Don't give up if your on to something it just might take several more try's. And then you'll hammer out the big hit.

Hypersoniq
Did the pick 3 filters help you any with the pick 3 and or pick 4 or not?

I have not had the time to incorporate everything into a backtest scenario yet, I had many of the same filters yield no useable results with the powerball, but the pick3/4 is a whole different animal...