OVERVIEW OF STRATEGIES TO WIN "LOTTO" Most of my talk about strategies is born out of frustration in not winning (of course), but mostly the lack of literature out there discussing the choices you can make in "LOTTO". Try this sometime. Try walking into a "B DALTONS" or "WALDENBOOKS" or even a specialty bookstore and try to find a book on the lottery - any book. If you're lucky, you will probably find a book by the two well known authors in the lottery business - GAIL HOWARD and ROBERT SEROTIC. Now I have nothing against Gail and Robert, in fact I find their discussions on "wheels" very useful. But I have a problem with any lotto book that assumes the reader can "trap" or "catch" the winning combination in a very small group of numbers (such as 20). Most readers would be extremely lucky if they could trap the winning combination in as few as 1/2 of the total possible numbers. Also every lottery book ever printed usually looks at the individual lottery numbers, such as "hot" numbers, rather than the "look and feel" of the SETS of lottery numbers as a whole. Thus most lottery books see the "trees", but miss the "forest". WHY ARE SETS OF LOTTERY NUMBERS SO IMPORTANT ? Sets of lottery numbers are important, because the prize structure of lotteries is heavily slanted towards the GRAND PRIZE WINNER !!! It is almost impossible to break even on a consistent basis by just winning the secondary prizes, such as the 2nd prize, 3rd prize. Playing the lottery is one of the WORST GAMBLES you can make if you are NOT SERIOUSLY trying to win the GRAND PRIZE. The payoffs on the secondary prizes are so low in most states, that you would be BETTER OFF heading out to the horse track, or dog track, or playing the slots in Atlantic City or Las Vegas. In fact it would be better for you to put your money in a low yielding CD (nowadays about 3 %) than to try to make money by hitting the secondary prizes in the lottery. So this brings me back to my point - If I hope to win the lottery, why is the set of 6 numbers taken as a whole so important ? FIRST, and foremost because WE DO NOT LIVE FOREVER. Think about this for a moment. If you are playing a lottery game every week, you will have 52 chances in a year, and about 1000 chances in 20 years to win the lottery. If you have a twice a week game, you will have 2000 chances in 20 years to win. Now with this in mind would you spend your hard earned money on a set of numbers, that because of it's look and feel, may not come up IN YOUR LIFETIME. This brings me to the set of numbers that I talk to people a lot about, namely 1-2-3-4-5-6. In most lotteries, hundreds perhaps thousands of people play this set of numbers. Now don't get me wrong, there is NOTHING WRONG WITH THIS SET OF NUMBERS WHEN IT COMES TO RANDOMNESS. Where you run into a problem with this set is, IF IT COMES UP IN YOUR LIFETIME, you will be sharing your wealth with hundreds of other people. Instead of winning a million dollars you will get something like $145.32. Back to 1-2-3-4-5-6. To the best of my knowledge there have been only 1 or 2 times in the ENTIRE HISTORY OF ALL LOTTERY GAMES IN THE U.S. where 5 consecutive numbers have been drawn. This is like 20,000 drawings. And remember the number of combinations of 6 consecutive numbers is many times smaller than the number of combinations that have 5 consecutive numbers. SECOND, If you hope to win, a vast majority of your sets of of lottery numbers should be well BALANCED. When I say well "balanced", what do I mean. By this I mean in most of your sets you should have some low numbers, some high numbers, and some middle numbers. Not only is this good for approaching the "look and feel" of a typical drawn set, but it CUTS YOU IN ON THE POSSIBILITY OF GETTING SECONDARY PRIZES. Most lottery combinations drawn DO NOT have all the numbers in a very tight range, at either the low or high end. This is called being "skewed". THIRD, If you are looking for BEAUTY ( read here "SYMMETRY") don't play the lottery. Most lottery combinations are UGLY. The spacing is almost always uneven and ragged. There is almost never a pattern to the number of evens and odds, or the number of different digits (0-9), or the front digit or last digit. In SUMMARY, to be in the hunt for the only prize that counts when playing the lottery, namely the grand prize, you have to play a substantial majority of your sets, with the mirror image or "look and feel" of the typical drawn set. Thus with not having any reliable sources on lottery sets, and theory, I was forced to dig through statistical runs on my home computer. Now I have a fairly powerful computer - namely an IBM 386 PC running at 25 MHZ - but even with this power the runs took hours and hours. All of this leads to a couple of basic questions: 1) Is there any "SURE" thing in the lottery, and is it meaningful ? 2) Is there any way to win the lottery, other than 100% luck? and could I cut this down to 90% LUCK, 10% SKILL. 3) Do I have to rely on brute force to win - a lot of sets of numbers - or can just a small group of numbers have a good chance of winning ? WELL HERE IS WHAT I FOUND OUT !!!! 1) There is no one way that works all the time. Sometimes playing the top numbers helps you win. Sometimes playing the top numbers within "ballsets" gets you close. Sometimes just playing the numbers that DID NOT come in last week helps. 2) YES, VIRGINIA, THERE IS A SURE THING IN THE LOTTERY - but unfortunately it does not "buy" you very much. Here I am talking about the SUMS of the numbers. In the FLORIDA 6/49 LOTTERY the sum of the numbers have NEVER, NEVER, been the same as the previous drawing. This is a 100 % sure thing after 211 drawings (almost 4 years). However each sum makes up less than 1 % of the numbers, so this does not reduce the probable number of combinations that much. 3) The SERIOUS lottery player must have the computer tools to choose different scenarios, such as different wheels or filtered random numbers. 4) Almost all the lottery software out there, does not have these tools, except for "wheels" - so I have put together the tools that I would like to see for playing the lottery.