Is there really anything you can do to change the chance that you'll win the lotto? Or is it all hopelessly fixed? The answer depends on who you ask and what their favorite theory is.Ask a scientist or mathematician, and they'll tell you that you absolutely cannot change your odds no matter what you do. All possible outcomes are equally likely. And statistics will prove them right.
Ask an avid lotto enthusiast, though, and you might here something different. The lotto lover will almost certainly say that not only can you change the odds, but that he or she has seen it done!
So we have mathematics supposedly proving it doesn't work, and yet hundreds of thousands of people believe otherwise and believe they have seen the proof in the results. What gives? Who's right? Are these people just delusional, seeing what they want to see? Or is the mathematics somehow wrong?
The answer to both sides of the question is "No". Lotto players who believe they can improve their odds of winning are not deluding themselves into seeing what they want to see, and no, the mathematics isn't wrong either. The mathematics does indeed prove that you cannot change the odds, but if you spend some time observing what happens when you do certain things, you'll see for yourself that indeed, you have done better than you would have done otherwise.
How is this possible? Because the calculated odds are not the empirical (observed) odds. This is where most people get confused. The calculated odds are dependant on the way the game is set up. If you have 49 numbered balls and you choose 6 completely at random, your calculated odds of picking the same 6 as someone guessed before the drawing would be 1 chance out of 13,983,816, because there are 13,983,816 unique combinations of 6 numbered balls that can be drawn out of a group of 49. As long as you are using 49 balls, and drawing 6 of them, and the drawing is as random as possible, the calculated odds will be the same no matter what you do.
The empirical odds, however, are an entirely different thing. By the same mathematical laws that make a flipped coin land heads up a predictable 50% of the time, given enough tosses, you will find that the numbers in each drawing tend to be average. In other words, they tend to fall in the middle of the possible range. Of course, with such high odds, it would be ludicrous to think you could write down a list of all the combinations and then cross them off to see where in the list they were, but there are other, much easier ways to achieve the same effect.
One of the most common methods of analyzing the previous draws of a lotto game to find that average is called sum analysis. The idea is that if you add up all the numbers that make up each of the drawings from your lotto game's history, you can find out which sums play and which don't. It's actually rather striking how many sum values that can play actually never do - even over decades! Now you tell me: If you saw that a particular sum value had never played in the last ten years, but another sum value had played 15 times, which one would YOU bet on? Now use this same idea on the results of analyzing 50 or 100 different trait averages, and you begin to narrow down how many combinations are left for you to play. Your calculated odds are the same; you, however, are playing with a higher chance to win because you are playing the same kind of combinations that actually hit the jackpot.
So you see, by observing what the lotto has done, you can get a very good idea what it will do. Download LottoWheeler and see for yourself!