In much the same way that logic is only the beginning of wisdom, not the end of it, mathematics is only the beginning of lottery success, and not the end of it. While it's statistically true that any number has an equal chance of coming up in a lotto drawing as compared to any other number, random data does tend to have interesting ways of grouping itself for lack of a better term. I think of it as a tendency of random events to "bunch" itself together.
Random groupings can be seen in ordinary everyday things, not just lottery results. An example of this is workplace birthday data. There are 42 employees where I work but yet 3 people have a Christmas Eve birthday, 2 people have a St. Patrick's Day birthday, 2 people share a September birthday, and I myself share a January birthday with a co-worker of mine. That's 21.4% of my workplace that have birthdays on just 4 of 365 days in the year, or on 1.1% of the days.
Another example is how an iPod shuffles music. I have many hundreds of varied selections on mine with genres ranging from classical to viking folk metal, yet all too often I have noticed the same artist or genre coming up back to back, or 3 of 4 songs played. I'm not sure if an iPod is designed to randomize music like that, but this frequent "bunching" of music seems unusual and not random despite the fact that it obviously is random.
The lottery is no different in the way that deltas occur in jackpot drawings. In Powerball you'll have at least 2 of the numbers bunched within 4 numbers or less of one another 84% of the time. This number goes up dramatically for smaller state/regional drawings for JP games with reduced number fields. The multi state game Hot Lotto has a 39 number white ball field with 5 selected and a close bunching happens 95% of the time in that game. I came up with my data by going back several years for these games and counting how many drawings fit these parameters.
My point is that while a solid grasp of mathematics and probability is key to understanding lottery chances and results it is equally important to understand behavior trends of random occurrences in nature and real life events.
While I doubt this knowledge will ever win me a jackpot at least I know that when I play powerball I can always eliminate the evenly spaced, well balanced number combinations (i.e. 03-11-17-35-52, or 15-21-28-44-57) and 84% of the time my lines would fit the historical pattern of at least one closely bunched pairing. In other words I'm making the trade off of having a zero chance of hitting a PB JP 16% of the time to something somewhat better than 1 in 175 million the rest of the time simply by eliminating well spaced combinations.
That is of course if this multi year trend continues which I have no reason to believe that it won't. Finding this trend was just a matter of putting in the work to look for it, now if I can only pick the winning numbers within the given parameters!