Economy class Belgium
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February 27, 2012
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Quote: Originally posted by BobP on Nov 7, 2015
Half the solution is the right wheel. This Lotto-Logix wheel is the most coverage powerful versus affordable wheel for 12 numbers playing Pick-6. Replace my place holder pointer numbers with your best picks. BobP
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December 3, 2014
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Quote: Originally posted by Ron5995 on Nov 8, 2015
For the regular lottery player, over 99% being luck with a fraction of a percent being game selection, numbers selection, and wager type / amount.
Back in the early days of lotteries, some attempted to play a very large percentage of combinations in games that featured jackpots well in excess of the odds. Ie. a $1 game with 1 in 1 million odds with a $5 million jackpot. Needless to say, lotteries most everywhere now require playslips to be filled out by hand.
Extended play games, such as Bingo, Crossword, etc, is another avenue in which some have likely come out far ahead by analyzing the uncovered numbers / letters on unplayed tickets to determine the likelihood of it being a winner. Lotteries and instant ticket vendors have taken steps to address this, but flaws likely still exist in some games. However, unless one has a lot of money to burn and/or is a lottery retailer with access to tickets, this is near impossible to game.
Speaking of lottery retailers and instants. They have a huge advantage, since they have physical access to the tickets and plenty of time to examine them for patterns (extended play games, in particular) along with tracking the losers and redemptions. While many players don't scratch in the store, some do and a very observant retailer can watch for streaks of losers and selectively play following tickets themselves, knowing that instant ticket packs are seeded with prizes in a predetermined fashion that can be gamed. Ie. a $300 pack of $1-$5 denomination will most often contain at least $140 or so in winners. Some lotteries even publish a guaranteed minimum.
In short, the easiest way to game the lottery is being a lottery retailer. Plus they receive ~5%+ commission on gross sales giving them an additional advantage over the regular player.
More than once there has been proof of how much an advantage lottery retailers have selling tickets but maybe with all these self serve machines where the tickets are hidden inside and not up by the cash register for idle clerks to examine or to look for certain "hot numbers" in a book of tickets ... might have changed that.
They might see a pattern from cashing tickets and buy certain tickets in various parts of a book for themselves.
Several years ago I bought the last five or six tickets in a book ... I could see there were not many tickets left and I always liked getting the last ticket, these tickets were in the glass case by the register, they didn't have a self serve terminal ... it was all over the area that there was a "last ticket" in a book of $20 tickets at this gas station in the country a few miles from this store ... I would stop there occasionally but not often ... anyway, no one would buy that last ticket for the longest time, I guess since it was $20. Finally someone did buy it and it was a $5,000 winner.
OK, getting back to my story of the few tickets left in that book which I decided to buy just to get the "last" ticket. I walked out the store with the tickets ... never looked at them till I got home ... turns out the last ticket was already gone ... someone in the store had ripped it off and bought it ... probably because of the $5,000 winning ticket story going around. That had never happened to me before ... so it never entered my mind to check the tickets. It was also a small gas station store and the woman was strangely quiet about me buying those tickets.
I was very mad but did not take the tickets back to the store ... live and learn, if I had looked before walking out of the store and had noticed the last ticket was gone, I would have demanded my money back.
I don't buy scratch offs very much but when I do ... I always get a few that are out of sight in self-serve machines ... I would figure none of the clerks are opening up the machine to check numbers ... but who knows, maybe they still do and maybe they buy all the last tickets also.