BobP,
Not sure if you read my first post here, but I suggested that he try the Lottery Post wheel filters, which are not only full-featured, but cheap. (Regarding your comment: "As the only other kind of filtering software is rather expensive, I suggest the following." — emphasis added by me.)
The problem with throwing CoverMaster at the problem is that it does not tend to produce balanced wheels. So saying that it won't filter out the jackpot winner is iffy at best.
Don't get me wrong, CoverMaster is an awesome tool, but at the same time one needs to understand what they are getting. Even though a CoverMaster wheel may be "minimal", saying it is "optimized" is not necessarily true.
In wheel terms "optimized" means minimal AND balanced, not just minimal.
ANY abbreviated wheel filters out jackpot-winners. It's the nature of the beast. By removing play selections, you're eliminating the jackpot-winner in nearly every case. That's why balanced wheels are so important to many who use wheels frequently. You're eliminating the bias of heavily-played numbers and placing equal emphasis on all of your number selections. One could make the case that you are reducing the risk of "filtering out the jackpot-winner".
Lottery Post has a series of hand-tuned lottery wheels that are both minimal AND balanced. Many of the wheels have notes to indicate its particular strengths and uses.
Since you're a Gold member you may not have explored the Abbreviated Wheels section, but it may be worth a look. (Abbreviated Wheels are a Platinum member option.)
In addition, the filtering tools I mentioned in my first post above provide the ability for even a non-expert to produce some fairly wicked filters. Yet experts appreciate the extensive selection of filters, with the abilty to combine the filters in a limitless way.
One of the downsides of tools like CoverMaster and others are that there is a learning curve as you try to figure out yet another software developer's opinion of the best interface to work with lottery numbers. Some software is nearly uncomprehensible. Others are pretty good. But regardless, everyone tends to have their own approach, and non-techies tend to have a hard time with it.
That's one of the reasons that Lottery Post's pages are all designed to work in a very linear fashion, which is easy for people to follow. You can generally work with the tools here from top to bottom, and there is always extensive help right on the page itself -- sometimes right next to the function you're working with. It is easy to follow.
To sum up:
- For reducing the number of tickets played while not requiring filtering, the Abbreviated Wheels offer a huge variety of options for any sized budget, big or small.
- If someone decides that they would like to specify filtering themselves, I believe the wrong approach would be applying a filter on top of an abbreviated wheel. BY starting off with an Abbreviated wheel, you are using a starting point that may already have combinations removed that would have otherwise met your crtieria. The right approach is to start with ALL combinations (a FULL wheel), and then eliminate those combinations the player feels have unrealistic chances of being drawn (which is done by applying filters). And that's exactly what you will find on the Full Wheels at Lottery Post.
You can view all the tools and documentation for wheels by clicking Lottery Wheels on the left side of this page, or by selecting Lottery Wheels Home Page in the Systems menu.