Ronnie316,
"Not sure..." You're going to have to do better than that if you want to convince people that "...some number combinations have better odds." (They don't.)
I've addressed the issue you raised here many times in the past. In the interest of not reinventing the wheel, here is a link to some scholarly research dealing with it, followed by a rehash of my remarks to dr san about it. I hope you won't waste any more of everyone's time trying to confuse these issues.
http://www.amstat.org/publications/jse/secure/v7n3/boland.cfm
This is a very interesting article. (Trying To Be Random in Selecting Numbers for Lotto - Boland) It could be subtitled, "Where Psychology Meets Mathematics!"
I wasn't able to access Speckman's article, "Lottery Loophole Explained." Do you know what the loophole was, and how long after 1986 it took them to close it?
Here are a couple quotes from Boland's article that others here might enjoy:
"For Lotto 6/42, P(MG = 1) = 0.56 is the probability of a selection containing two consecutive numbers. Students usually find it very surprising and nonintuitive that it is more likely than not that a random selection will contain two consecutive numbers. Before giving students the probability of two consecutive numbers appearing in Lotto, it is a worthwhile exercise to test their intuition by asking them for estimates of it!" (Read the article if this intrigues you!)
"5. Conclusions
"21 The whole concept of randomness is a delicate one, and one about which considerable research has been done, particularly in the field of psychology. Reichenbach (1949) claimed that humans are unable to produce a random sequence of responses, even when explicitly asked to do so, and considerable research since then (including our work) generally supports this. Many teachers/lecturers have told us of classroom activities they use to get students thinking about randomness, and Green (1997)gives an interesting account of an experiment on recognizing randomness.
"22 How well can individuals perform when they attempt to be random generators for a game like Lotto? Some interesting insights into human intuition about randomness may be obtained by asking a class of students to participate in an exercise that tries to answer this question. We asked each of the students in a large class to act once as a random generator for the winning numbers in our Irish National Lottery - Lotto 6/42 game. The results were then analysed and compared with actual recent winning selections in our Lotto game, as well as with another set simulated by computer. Using boxplots, histograms, QQ-plots, and some basic measures of spread in a sample, one is able to generate interesting classroom discussions about biases that individuals seem to possess. We observed (perhaps not surprisingly) that there seems to be a propensity for individuals to select numbers in increasing order. We also observed that individuals tend to select numbers which on the average are smaller (by at least two) than would be expected from a truly random generator. Of course, in other countries or states where a different form of Lotto is played, the results will probably differ. When it comes to the spread in a selection, we observed that individuals tend to make selections that are reasonably spread out as measured by sample variance, but not in other ways (for example, as measured by the so-called minimum gap in a selection). In particular, we observed a clear reluctance of individuals (compared to a truly random generator) to make selections containing consecutive numbers."
--Jimmy4164