Not at all.
You can literally make something riduclously tiny like 1 or 2 bucks an hour (unless you've got a large bankroll and are very good, then you can make around 10 bucks an hour if you find the right machine). Card counting can give you a bigger edge, but obviously the casinos don't want you doing it and you have to be sure that you're doing it correctly, otherwise you will lose. I actually do most of my gambling with Poker, as I've been able to squeeze the most profit out of that game, relative to how often I get to play. Still not enough to live off of.
I never said I'd quit my job to do it lol. That's ludicrous. But playing a slightly winning game is much better than a slightly losing one. And the opportunity on the Lottery is to play a game that's a large losing game, no matter what, for the small possibility for a huge payout. Nothing inherently wrong with that. Just don't spend more than you can afford to lose, and don't expect to develop a winning system.
And Ronnie, I'd just like to point out that I literally just picked a set of numbers using an RNG. I didn't care to use any method or do anything. I was kinda just hoping mine would do as well as yours, so I could point out that a random set is just as likely to hit as any other. It's still true, regardless of how my randomly generated set of numbers did. You can believe whatever you want, obviously, but I really see no reason to believe that the lottery draws are anything except random.
I'm just saying you've spent months trying to crack the lottery and determine that certain combos have better odds. A fruitless goal, since any results you get would be statiscally insignificant for thousands and thousands of draws. Therefore, any conclusion you came up with would be an opinion, not proof. But I digress. The only reason that some combos COULD have better odds is IF the balls aren't all as likely as one another to get chosen. I see no evidence of that, and even though they are physics based, and could never be truly 100% random, there is no possible way I could capitalize on any information about the differences between the balls, so I must treat it as 100% random. If I knew for a fact that certain known balls were lighter or heavier, or too big or posititioned somewhere where it will get stuck in the machine, then maybe I could play profitably. Obviously, that's not the case - because even if those conditions exist - I can't possibly find out.
Such logic has treated me well. Since I stopped playing the Lottery (except in rare instances), my gambling has been profitable. Although not enough to live off of, I turned a hobby that costed me money into one that makes me a small amount of cash. That's good enough for me. I have fun, and win, rather than have fun and lose. I enjoy the lottery because I play about 5ish times a year. If there's a really nice jackpot, I take a shot. A bad investment, sure, but the cost is the same as a bag of chips or a soda. No biggy. I actually no longer consider the lottery gambling, since every other gambling activity I do couldn't significantly change my wealth in a day, but will have much larger swings up and down than 1 dollar. And because the money I gamble with is seperate from the money I use on everything else, the 10-20 dollars I spend on lottery a year now comes from the "everything else" money.
All I'm saying is that the effort to find any set of numbers that will consistently beat the lottery, or to find any system which would do the same, is not worth the effort. For one thing, think about every game of chance which can be beat. Say, blackjack. Any card counter will tell you that you only risk a small portion of your capital (what you are willing to lose if everything goes wrong) on any given hand. The equation they use is (Advantage/Variance*Bankroll.) and most counters bet a fraction of this, or ignore it altogether except to make sure they don't exceed it. So for an example, if a counter has an edge on the next hand of 1.5 percent, the variance is about 1.33 and their bankroll is 6000, they can bet up to about 65 dollars without presenting too much risk.
The variance on a game like Powerball is in the 100s of thousands, if not millions. Even if an advantage was found, it would be a hell of a risky bet. Say you somehow find a 20% edge. And say the variance is 1 million. To bet comforably and ride out the wins and losses associated with gambling, you'd need a bankroll of 5 million dollars to play 1 dollar comforably according to that criterion.
BTW, Geez, you guys are hostile. And I will make a couple more comments if you guys care for me to. If you don't, I can just leave. No problem - it doesn't bother me. I wasn't trying to be rude. I have found out how to win at gambling. Find games with positive expectation, manageable risk and have good money management. It's not much money unless you are capitalized properly, and very few people are good enough to make a career out of it. I do think many people are good enough to make a profitable hobby out of it, if they start asking the right questions. After all, I used to try to beat the lottery too. After taking statistics, I became convinced that I could profit by gambling, but probably not get rich. And I have much more fun gambling now than I did in the past. And you are free to pursue whaever makes you happy.
Just leaving my friendly advice. Don't think you can beat the lottery. There are gambles in this world which can be in your favor, but the state lotteries very, very rarely do. Only during some promotions, and even then, you need to use assume that every ball has an equal chance of occuring. I'm sure I've written of the instance where this occured in some past post (it was on the Pick 3/4 in NJ which essentially gave each ticket slightly more than 100% return for 1 draw, btw) so I won't go into exetreme detail.... I would just tell you to avoid seeing patterns where none purposefully exist. None of these big lotteries have statiscally relevent results.
The last thing I have to say is that in order to improve the expected value of a lottery ticket, you can choose higher numbers, since out of the roughly 20% of tickets that are self picked, many are skewed towards dates, and therefore numbers below 31.