Original Blog Entry: Ball Placement Probability

Developer — Sat, 20 Aug 2011 09:40:45 GMT

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.

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