Before the drawing neither of them know what's going to be drawn so I'm just comparing 20 combos to 20 other combos. One is getting $20 worth of action and the other is making an educated guess maybe based on percentages.
"Some systems target individual numbers, whereas some systems(like mine) target characteristics of the entire set."
If a player guesses that 2 or 3 of the numbers will be even, 2 or 3 of the numbers will be low, and uses that distribution in all 20 combos, they only have an edge when they guess correctly. How big of an edge would depend on how many of the QPs had that distribution. If they guess wrong, they have no chance of matching all 5 numbers and the edge goes to the QP player providing at least one of their combos has another distribution.
About 42% of all the combinations in MM have that distribution and they should be correct in about 42% of the drawings using it. Since we don't know what the QP distribution will be, we can't determine if there is an edge. RJ compares a like number of QPs to their system every draw so over time an evaluation can be made.
Playing that distribution might get an overall edge over QPs, but it's still only 20 out of a possible 1.6 million combos having that distribution. The chances of hitting the jackpot depends on how many numbers are in the set and the total number of possible combos the distribution creates. We won't get paid off for matching a correct distribution or a set of numbers unless we have the right combo within them.
"Depending on the method used, the edge increase can applied to all prize levels."
In games with bonus balls like MM, the payoffs of $7 for matching 3 and $150 for matching 4 of the 5 numbers isn't much help to a system's player considering the odds. In most 5/39 games the payoffs are around 10% of the overall possibilities. In Rolling Cash 5 the odds of matching 2 numbers is 1 in 10 and the payoff is $1; matching 3 is 1 in 103, pays $10 and matching 4 is 1 in 3387 and pays $300. The odds of matching 3 in MM is 1 in 306 and 1 in 15,313 for matching 4.
A system that consistently picks 3 and an occasional 4 numbers playing a 3 if 4 wheel will give to give an edge by lowering the cost of play, but a system would still have to win a jackpot to prove it had an edge or the same number of QPs. Before the drawing I can't see any edge 20 system picks have over 20 QPs for winning the jackpot.
Did the jackpot winner playing his grand kids' birth dates have an edge, the players that won with QPs, or did "none of the above" have an edge?