I got started playing "the numbers" in 1995. We didn't have a state lottery and as of yet, not a numbers game.
I have a friend that I rode with every Saturdays and she would say, I need to stop here and put my numbers in. I didn't know what she meant. I didn't grow up playing numbers and had never heard of it.
When she told me what it was, I was like - that's the dumbest thing I ever heard of and thought only stupid people who live in this kind of neighborhood would even think a thing. I was truly a snob about it.
I'm the type of person who like to think that there is something between my ears, so I decided that since I had to stop here every Saturday, I'll find a little bit more about it. The numbers man had records and he let me Xerox them. So I would take the last two numbers that hit, look through the records and see when the two draws came together in the history and play the other numbers that were near. I'd had a Statistics class in school.
We played the - acar, gge and rettub for midday and NY, PA, ILL, and SC when it came aboard. We can only play ILL pick 4 and none of the states midday.
I guess you know what happened then, I hit like crazy. They nicknamed me the "shouting lady" because I would be shouting and jumping up and down. People would follow me to my car hounding me asking "what you like, what you like" I'd have to write my tickets before I went in side. I remember getting completely out of debt from winnings.
In those days it was real easy to hit. Of course there were more than one number house and I frequented them all and hung out with the best of the best players who had been playing all their life and knew the followers like the back of their hands for the community. I knew people by their pet number when sometimes I didn't know their names.
So, I learned the old school up in the hood way. They voted one day on whether I was a snob or not. I thought I had gotten better.lol I just couldn't see playing tag numbers, the same number every day, and dreams as a legitimate way of coming up with the hit until I started dreaming numbers (another story)
I've kept daily records since of those states and in the process of recording the draws, I've learned the followers, trends, patterns, workouts, the true rundown, other rundowns, etc. and even how V-tracs fit in the picture mathematically.
I have learned equally here on LP because I only looked at a few states before, now I can read the followers, trends, patterns, etc of the entire board (all states). Little did I know that the same numbers that I tracked were traveling the states. There was so much I didn't know about the lottery and the different methods but it was the old school way that gives me the edge.