Hey guys, new to LP and playing the lottery in general. I got interested after seeing the 640m
jackpot a couple of weeks ago. I've always thought I had zero chance of winning but after spending
a few hours hacking up some code and testing some ideas I think my chances could be slightly better than
zero especially at hitting a 5-0. Anyway I've played 4 drawings including the big one and I've hit
a 3-0 and a 1-1 playing 20 tickets at each drawing. Not great but I'm happy so far because my
losers are in the ballpark and I'm seeing the same patterns in the winners.
Anyway... to my question. I'm not a huge fan of back testing because I think you may tend
to gravitate toward creating a GREAT system for picking past winners but be worthless at
picking new winners. But I've found that leaving out the most recent data and testing to
see how often you hit those seems to be a reasonable method. My system is picking 15-20 5-0's
and a lot more 4-0's in a 100K of picks. I'm curious how that compares to what you guys are seeing.
Overall the 4-0 and 5-0 seems to hit at 62% and 77% better than random after preliminary
testing. The powerball is another matter and I've not come up with anything that is better than
random but I'm just getting started and I've got a lot to learn.