"If anyone does really use past results to predict future results successfully, don't expect them to spend time trying to explain what they are doing"
I don't care whether or not anybody explains what they're doing. I'd just like to see some of the people claiming that analyzing past results enables them to pick future winners would explain why that works. As I said previously, the only way that analysis of any kind (including "substitution") could allow successful prediction of future results is if the past results have some kind of affect on the future results.
"I have yet to see anyone posting such a thread to have a prediction stat showing they have ever done better than the overall average for the games they predict."
I don't doubt that some people occasionally have lucky streaks, but that's just one of the perfectly natural results of random probability. It's no different than rolling a die. If you roll a die 6 times at least one of the 6 possible results will probably turn up more than once. The obvious corollary is that at least one of the possible results probably won't occur even once. And it's just the same when people play pick 3 or pick 4. Just as 1000 drawings will produce some of the 1000 possible results more than once (with some not turning up even once), some players will win more than 1 out of 1000 or 1 out of 10,000 times simply as a result of random probability. Of course they'll be almost perfectly balanced out by players who win less than 1 in 1000 or 1 in 10,000 times.
"Most of the real players acknowledge they are making conditional bets"
They may acknowledge it, but I've got a perception that most don't actually understand it. Wheels are the most obvious example. The supposed improvement in odds of any given wheel is always offset by the limited chance that the conditions of the wheel will be met. If you only play birthday numbers for the 5 white balls in PB each play gives you a 1 in 169,911 of getting all 5 right if all of the winning numbers are birthday numbers, but the chances that all of the numbers will be birthday numbers is only 1 in 66.14. That gives you a 1 in 66.14 chance of having a 1 in 169,911 chance of getting all 5 numbers right, for an overall chance of 1 in 11,238,513, exactly the odds of picking the correct 5 out of all 69. Of course that comes back to the delusion that not all 69 balls have the same chance of being drawn, and that you can magically predict the more likely numbers based on previous results.