Choosing your numbers

You have two options when picking your numbers for any lottery game. You can elect to have the numbers picked for you by a piece of computer software, or some other random number generator, as with a lucky dip facility. This is the quickest and easiest way of choosing your numbers, and frankly is no less successful than any other method. In fact some sources suggest that you are actually statistically more likely to win if you allow the computer to choose the numbers for you.

Lucky numbers - Using lucky numbers are one of the most common ways of picking lottery numbers. Be it birthdays, numbers from your car registration, special dates, football shirt numbers or anything else, most people tend to pick numbers that either have some particular significance to them or else look pretty on the ticket. The problem with this, as mentioned earlier, is that you are unlikely to be alone in picking this sort of number, so you’ll be likely to share your prize pool with a larger than average number of people if your numbers do come up.

The other major downside with playing according to a specific set of numbers is that you are then duty bound to continue playing them for life. Once you have them committed to memory, you either have to keep going with them persistently, or never look at the lottery results ever again. There can be little worse in life than seeing ‘your’ numbers come up only to realise that you haven’t bought a ticket for 6 weeks.

Statistical analysis - These analysis are quite an interesting way of approaching playing the lottery. But please bear in mind that they will probably do more for you brain than they will for your wallet. The lottery numbers come up according to random chance. The machines are built and tested to exacting specifications, so there can be no bias. Following these methods will give you peace of mind that you’ve taken a statistically sound approach to picking your numbers, but you are just as likely to win by playing a lucky dip.

• Best numbers – The best number analysis simply involves charting each number and the number of times it has been drawn. The best number is the one that has been drawn the most often.
  
• Positional analysis – This analysis involves sorting the winning numbers of the lottery into ascending order, and tabulating the results to create a chart with each number down the side, positions 1 to 6 along the top, and the frequency of each number in each position in the table body. This allows you to identify and pick numbers that are statistically frequent for each of the 6 drawn ball positions.
  
• Wheeling systems – A wheeling system allows you to bet on a range of numbers in 6 ball combinations, without necessarily covering every combination. The numbers in the wheel will normally be those with high frequency in the positional analysis. As the amount of numbers you wish to cover increases, the total number of bets will grow exponentially.
  
• Dimitrov Wheeling system – This is a wheeling system that allows you to cover a large number of winning possibilities based on a positional analysis, without covering every single one. A common one is the System 36, which gives you 5 bets of 6 numbers, from a total of 11 chosen numbers. You put the numbers in order as follows:
  
  
  1      4
  2      6
  3      12
  4      15
  5      24
  6      28
  7      31
  8      35
  9      40
  10    41
  11    44
  
  You then take the Dimitrov System 36 table below:
  
  

  01 02 03 04 05 06

  01 02 03 07 08 09

  01 02 03 09 10 11

  04 05 08 09 10 11

  06 07 08 09 10 11

  
  Then you transfer your chosen numbers from your list into the positions that correspond with their matched number. For the numbers above, this would leave you with:
  
  

  04 06 12 15 24 28

  04 06 12 31 35 40

  04 06 12 40 41 44

  15 24 35 40 41 44

  28 31 35 40 41 44

  
  You then read down the chart to get your 5 sets of numbers.
  
• Skip/Hit charts – This approach takes the opposite view of thinking that the most frequently occurring numbers are likely to occur again, and involves creating a chart that tabulates the length of time since each number was last drawn. If you wish, you could then pick a selection of numbers and apply a wheeling system.
  
• Cluster analysis – This is getting into the realms of advanced statistical analysis and probably requires the use of computer software or a spreadsheet to keep everything monitored.

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