Discovering Possible Lottery Winning Combinations...

There are two types of lottery combinations - those that are likely, and those that are unlikely.

So here's how to pick those that are more likely.

OK. Scratch that.

If like most people you were happily nodding along to that 'fact', then you've probably been the victim of the lottery prediction industries' cruel misinformation campaign.

Because there is no such thing as an unlikely combination. It just doesn't exist.

When You Hear This, Run..!

But I bet you've been told how certain combinations should be avoided. Because they are 'unlikely', or 'will never be drawn'.

It's obvious, right?

I mean, when was the last time that all consecutive numbers like '10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15' were drawn? Never, right!

The huge flaw in that argument though, is that they simply haven't been drawn YET.

Just like MILLIONS of other sets of numbers.

Unsure? How Many 'Unlikely' Combinations Are There...

Put it this way. How many different combinations have ever been drawn in the lottery since the day it began?

Nobody knows that off the top of their head, of course. But if you think about how many draws there have actually been, things start to become clearer.

Most big lottery games are drawn once a week, some twice. But virtually every lottery game in the world has been running less than 60 years, most a lot less.

So let's go over the top and guess it at 100 years of 2 draws a week.

How many draws is that? It's just 10,400 draws.

Now compare that to the number of possible lottery winning combinations. Even for a 6 balls from 49 game, there are 13,983,816 possible results. (With a game like the US Powerball it's over 175 Million - more than 12 times as many!)

Even if no results have ever been repeated, that still leaves 13,973,416 combinations that have never been drawn. Ever!

So does that make all of these 'unlikely' or 'bad combinations' to choose... or just the 44 sets of these that are actually consecutive...

Do 'Unlikely Combinations' Really Exist?

So does it mean anything at all that '10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15' is one of them?

No. It really doesn't.

It makes just as much sense to say "never pick 3, 9, 28, 35, 36, 42 because that will never come up".

There is only difference between the two sets of numbers. This combination is boring.

If it did come up, nobody would even think twice. But if '10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15' gets drawn, the internet would be ablaze with news stories about the weird lottery results, and how the lottery must be rigged.

So why do we feel it's different?

Purely because our brain is hard-wired that way. We are designed by nature to see patterns in things. We're also trained at school to see these patterns too.

"What number comes next... 2, 4, 6, _ "

See what I mean - we're already writing the number '8' before finishing reading the question..!

But our brains are fooling us. Remember, the numbers in a lottery don't really mean a darn thing. They are only there to make it easy to pick numbers and check results - what we're really picking are ping pong balls bouncing around in a big tumbler.

The Weird Number-less Lottery Draw...

Let's take that same lottery game, and scrub the numbers off the balls.

Instead we put a different picture on each ball. Whatever floats your boat - different cars, birds, bikes, or er, boats.

Are the balls that used to be marked '10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15' still less likely to be drawn? Or are they now more likely to be drawn because they are NOT consecutive numbers any longer?

Or perhaps were they are always just as likely to be the winning combination as any other set of numbers...

Real Winning Combinations

The truth is, that the real winning combos only ever happen after the draw has been made. At the time when somebody somewhere discovers that their ticket was the lucky one.

You can make yourself more likely to win by covering more of the possible combinations, i.e. by buying more tickets. But a random quick-pick ticket is just as likely to win as any other. It's designed to be that way, or it wouldn't be a fair and legal game.