When I started looking at playing lottery games it did not take me long to realize that there is no strategy in the world that can predict what the winning numbers are going to be for a specific drawing. Anyone who says differently is selling snake oil.
To understand if a strategy will be successful one must first define what the goal of the strategy is. For some people the goal is winning more than they spend, for others it is winning a multi-million-dollar jackpot. Attempting to define and execute a strategy without a goal is the equivalent of having no strategy at all.
The second part of defining a strategy is understanding how much you are willing to spend and how long you are willing to wait to reach the goal. The amount one is willing to spend has a direct impact on the amount of time needed for the strategy to achieve the goal.
If I were to commit to a strategy that involved spending $100.00 per year even if the strategy took 20 years to achieve the goal under worst case odds and I won $2,000,000 I’d still be way ahead of what I spent to win. Of course, I’d feel much better about winning if I won the first month of executing the strategy as opposed to 20 years later.
For this post, I’m going to focus on the goal of winning a multi-million-dollar jackpot without having to spend more than $1,000.00 a year.
Because it is impossible to predict what the winning numbers are going to be for a specific drawing we are dependent on identifying patterns within the drawings and hope that pattern even shows up at some point in the future.
It would be great if the pattern hit within the first few drawings, but that is rarely the case and in developing a strategy you should plan on having to play for an extended period of time, especially if the drawings only occur once or twice a week.
If I were to flip a coin 10 times there are 1024 possible patterns for the outcome of those 10 flips. If my strategy for winning the jackpot depended on 6 flips in a row being heads there would be 16 opportunities for me to win. My odds of winning the jackpot would be 1.5%.
To make this strategy work at a bare minimum I would need to commit to playing 64 times to win. However, there is a chance that 6 heads in a row may not occur within those first 64 drawings so my strategy should factor in having to play several cycles of 64 drawings.
If I could also make the system work for 6 tails in a row my odds of winning increase to 3% and it reduces the minimum number of drawings that I must play down to 32. Although now my cost per game has now increased because of the additional pattern, but it would be a tradeoff I’d be willing to accept for achieving my goal sooner.
Sadly, there are not games out there with those kinds of odds so let’s look at a game where to win one must match pick 6 out of 60 number. The odds of winning the jackpot for that game are 1 in 50,063,860.
There are approximately 16,483,600 combinations of winning numbers where 3 numbers are 30 under and 31 and over. If I just play combinations of those numbers I’ve automatically tripled my chances of picking the right combination of numbers although I’ve done it at the price of guaranteeing that on average I will only have a chance of winning once per every 3 drawings.
Suppose I take it a step further and divide the 60 numbers by 10. There are 1,000,000 combinations of winning numbers that involve 1 digit from each of the 6 segments. That means for roughly every 50 drawings my odds of winning would be 1 in 1,000,000.
If this game has a drawing every day and I have committed to play about $1000 a year that would leave me about $3 per drawing to play even if I never won a dollar reducing my odds to about 1 in 333,333. If on average I win back about 360 dollars a year and sink that back into the game my odds are 1 in 250,000.
In the end this strategy is still going to require a bit of luck and possibly several dozen years to pay off, but to me it offers a realistic possibility of winning without breaking the bank if I don’t while sustaining the “Wat if” fantasy each day.
Ultimately that is what lottery pattern strategies are, breaking the numbers in segments that increase the chance of picking the right combination of numbers. Although instead of taking static segments based on the sequential order of the numbers they break the numbers into segments based on trend data. The key is understanding the spend versus reward ratio.
When evaluating a strategy:
- Define a goal
- Determine how long you are willing to commit to the strategy
- Define how much you are willing to spend annually to execute the strategy
- Determine the frequency of the pattern in the strategy
- Determine the odds of picking the correct numbers within the pattern