LOL.
Well, after being entertained by this thread I decided to weigh in with my experience, for what it's worth (certainly not a jackpot, yet).
I buy tickets twice a week for a pool at work We play PB, MM, and Texas Lotto, depending on my mood, and the size of the jackpot in each game. I usually favor MM because I can buy twice the tickets than PB, and Texas Lotto doesn't get as high as PB or MM.
Ok, so my usual method of operation is to play as many numbers as I can. There are 11 of us, so in MM I can play 55 numbers on 11 lines. Cool, huh? I just play the numbers random. Well, obviously, the problem is getting the winning numbers on the same line. It's great to have all the numbers on my tics, but really disappointing to always have just 2 winning numbers on one line and the others scattered. I have tried this often with Texas Lotto as I can play all 54 numbers on 9 lines, and even have a set of 20 lines from Lotto Logix wheel playing all 54 numbers on 20 lines. I have kept track of the 20 line sets, and rarely do better than 3 out 6, once in a blue moon 4 out of 6. (I don't play all that myself, just on paper). So, after reading this very enlightening thread, I played the last 2 MM draws with a reduced field of numbers. I decided to pick at random 25 numbers and play them on 11 lines. The first draw, I had 3 winning numbers, but only 2 on one line. Last Friday I had 4 winning numbers, 3 on one line. Winner winner chicken dinner!
Very short time period for the experiment, but... promising. Any time we try to reduce the odds by filtering, reducing the field, etc, there are going to be conditons. But to me, when we're playing in a sandbox as big as PB and MM, trying to reduce the odds even with conditions is the smart way to go.
Thanks, Ronnie316.