My nearly ten-year lottery experiment is coming to an end. And now - lo! - I will reveal the secret of my research.
OK, so this whole thing started when I was trying to silence some nerds in the math lab. They were all like "nuh-uh" and I was like "yeah huh" and they were all like "prove it" - and so I did.
So, can you really increase your odds of winning the lottery? Here's what I found out.
I wrote a simple program in Visual Basic (just saying that made my glasses get six times thicker) that chose six numbers from the top 50% of the most frequently chosen numbers in the Washington State Lottery. I played these against a set of numbers that were drawn at random by the retailer's lotto machine.
My numbers won a lower tier prize five-to-one times more frequently than the randomly chosen numbers. This was consistent for almost ten years of drawings.
However, the randomly chosen numbers won more money. I came within one number of winning with the randomly chosen numbers four times in the space of one year (2007-2008). This prompted the Lotto counter guy at Uwajimaya to exclaim, "My God! You are the luckiest man I have ever known!"
All of that aside, I discovered the real way to win more money more frequently - all of the above BS aside. It is this:
Play the best odds game (in Washington State that would be Hit 5 at 1 in 575,757) in no more than $3 increments. If you play $21, you have the best odds of winning at least some of your money back. I don't know why this works. It just does. In the last five drawings, I have won $17, $4, $23, $63, $19. I'm not money ahead, but you gotta admit there's something to it.
And how did I figure that out? Two words: INTUITION. I intuited that the seed number getting reset every third time created better odds than -
...oh you're asleep now.
Have fun. Good luck.