Monday, November 01, 2010

How to Win a Little Bit of Money in the Lottery

Our current development effort has been focused on calculating the amount of money a lottery player would win if they were to use a wheeling strategy. For those who wonder, a lottery wheel refers to playing all the possible combinations using a small subset of numbers. For example, if you select 7 numbers to be wheeled in a 5 number game, there would be 42 possible combinations.

Similarily, we can also utilize a varying amout of bonus balls (Mega Balls, Powerballs, Hot Balls) in our wheel. Supposing that you wish to wheel 5 bonus balls with the above example, there would be a grand total of 42 times 5 or 210 total combinations to be played.

However, we believe that spending $210 on a single drawing is a lot of money. So we wanted to see what would happen if we simply select 5 white ball numbers and wheeled the bonus balls only. The problem we encountered was : What five balls and bonus balls should we play?

For this, we decided to: select the first 5 white balls listed in our Hot and Cold Analysis, and obtain the bonus balls from the Hot Cold analysis as well. Then we applied this strategy to the Mega Millions, Powerball, and Hot Lotto games and reviewed the past 6 months drawings (26 total) to see is we won anything.  This is what we found:
  • For Mega Millions, we used the white balls ( 2, 4, 10, 13, 20 ), and the Megaballs ( 9, 13, 18, 19, 25, 26, 31, 36, 41 ). This means we spent $9 in each game or $234 total. We would have had 3 ( 3-white + MB ) and 7 ( 1-white + MB ) winners, returning $660 back to us. Deducting the $234 that we spent, we would have profited $426.
  • For Powerball, we used the white balls ( 7, 10, 16, 17, 20  ), and the Megaballs ( 13, 15, 20, 27, 30, 34, 39 ). This means we spent $7 in each game or $182 total. We would have had 1 ( 3-white + PB ),  1 ( 2-white + PB ),  5 ( 1-white + PB ), and 4 (  PB only ) winners, returning $181 back to us. Deducting the $182 that we spent, we would have lost $1.
  •  For Hot Lotto, we used the white balls ( 1, 13, 14, 15, 26  ), and the Hot Balls ( 4, 6, 7, 15, 17 ). This means we spent $5 in each game or $130 total. We would have had 2 ( 3-white + HB ),  2 ( 2-white + HB ),  3 ( 1-white + HB ), and 5 (  HB only ) winners, returning $155 back to us. Deducting the $130 that we spent, we would have profited $25.
As you can see, we would have earned a profit on both Mega Millions and Hot Lotto, and would have lost only one dollar on Powerball.

Since each of these games allows us to buy a multiplier, we recommend that this be done in all cases. If we did, the Powerball would have returned a profit of approximately $179, Mega Millions $1,512 profit, and Hot Lotto $205 profit.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Note: Based on the results of our Poll , we decided to recommend all Power & Mega balls in every drawing after Octorber 22, 2007. This change will make these lotteries consistent with the International and other "mega" ball based lotteries.
Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...