Is Lotto Statistical Data Useful or Not?

Question

In a pick 6 out of 49 lotto drawing:

Lowest possible outcome: 01-02-03-04-05-06 = 21
Largest possible outcome: 44-45-46-47-48-49 = 279

Out of the 13,983,816 total possible outcomes, the 6 winning numbers In ascending order:
1st will be between 01 - 44
2nd will be between 02 - 45
3rd will be between 03 - 46
4th will be between 04 - 47
5th will be between 05 - 48
6th will be between 06 - 49

Take the (21+279)/2 & Standard Deviation of about 33, means most of the winning numbers will add up to somewhere between 117 - 183.

Most winning numbers will be redrawn within 8 drawings.

After collecting data of past drawings:
Would you bet on numbers with high frequency?
Would you bet on numbers that haven't been drawn for over 8 drawings?

I've won 4 times so far, selecting 5 out of the 6 winning numbers. I stopped counting the the times I've won, selecting 4 & 3 out of the 6 winning numbers. I'm still trying to win a jackpot.

I need more computing power & luck =0p

Since most of the six winning numbers will total 117 - 183, how can 01-02-03-04-05-06 have the same odds of being drawn?

01+02+03+04+05+06 = 21, and that's the only way to total up to 21 in a pick 6 out of 49 lottery game. That holds true for the other extreme of 44+45+46+47+48+49 = 279.

Wouldn't eliminating the possible outcomes that fall outside the 117 - 183, be a wise thing to do?

Past drawings can show a bias towards certain numbers. Who knows? Are the lottery machines & ping pong balls truly a random? Don't forget the human factor?

On Court TV, a casino's Roulette Wheel was compromised with a pocket pc ... http://www.courttv.com/takedown/105.html

http://search.yahoo.com/search;_ylt=A0geu70_IANGqkIAV19XNyoA?p=%22Takedown%22+Court+TV+Roulette&ei=UTF-8&fr=yfp-t-501&x=wrt&vm=r

Answer 1

All of your information is irrelevant. Lottery number selections are independent probabilities. This means that what happened in the past is totally unrelated to what might happen in the future. It is a basic concept of probability.

If you are smart enough to make these calculations, you should be smart enough to know this and stop wasting your time calculating these things - unless you are doing it just for fun.

The only exception would be if there was some accidental flaw in the system or it was fixed, in a way where each ball does not have an equal probability of being selected. Being that state lotteries are very regulated, I think this is extremely unlikely.

Answer 2

This data is useless for picking winning lottery numbers. The numbers from past drawings have no effect on the likelihood of a particular number being selected. Each number has the same chance of being selected in every drawing.

The belief that some numbers will occur more frequently than others or that numbers not selected recently are "due" is called the Gambler's Fallacy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gambler's_fallacy

Answer 3

I select the 8 most frequent numbers from the past year, then the next 8, and choose 2 lines of 6 numbers from these, using 1 random other number.

Answer 4

In a random draw these figures are meaningless.

The numbers don't have "memory." If your chances of, say, flipping a fair coin are 50% and you hit heads 5 straight times, your odds of hitting it again are still 50%. You aren't more likely to hit it since you're on a streak of heads and you aren't less likely to hit it because tails is "due."

Assuming the lottery is fair, you can't beat it. No number is more or less likely to come out, regardless of past data. This experiment you did speaks to the bigger problem of finding patterns in data that don't exist in what the data represents. Sure, you find a pattern in a random lottery drawing, but it doesn't give you any predictive power in the future.

Answer 5

I think you are correct in your info as I have won with previous winning numbers also playing pick 3.........very good info and I think it is very useful but of course a little luck helps too.