Lottery Strategies #1 - A Small Pile Is Your Best Bet
Welcome back everyone. I hope that all of you are well rested (or have recuperated) after the Christmas season. It feels good to be back and posting again. The other day, I received a comment on a post I made back on September 1, 2008, Lottery Strategies #1- Play Your Own Game . At first, I was just going to return the comment but, instead, I’ve decided to make it my first post for 2009.
First of all, thanks to Ron for taking the time to comment. I enjoy feedback from Serious Lottery Players; it gets my juices flowing and forces me to look at playing the lottery from different vantage points. So, to start off the new year, hats off to Ron. You might want to go back to the post to pick up the thread before reading further.
If there is are 25,827,165 wagers in a big pile and you select one (6/54 lottery), your odds of that ticket being the jackpot winner are 1:25,827,165. The act of reaching in and picking a ticket didn’t improve those odds one bit.
Now, suppose that you go through the pile and remove any wager that has the number 17 in it. After a lot of work, you have created a subset of the 6/54 lottery. That subset contains 22,957,480 wagers in it. Next, you select one ticket from this subset and, as long as the number 17 is not one of the winning numbers, your odds of that ticket being the jackpot winner have improved to 1:22,957,480.
Here’s another way of looking at it. You have a small pile of tickets and a large pile of tickets. All of the tickets in the small pile are also duplicated in the large pile. So, if the winning ticket is in the smaller pile, it will also be in the larger pile. Therefore, if the winning ticket is in the smaller pile, your chances of winning are better by selecting a ticket out of the smaller pile. By the way, you will be correct in choosing the smaller pile over 90% of the time.
Obviously, the act of picking a ticket out of a pile doesn’t Improve Your Chances of winning, but which pile you pick from can.
