Lottery Systems

Since the legalization of the lottery almost 20 years ago, people started selling systems to show you how to beat it (big surprise).

Do people honestly think that someone is going to sell them a system to win the lottery for $29.95? If I had a system to win the lottery I would give it to my Mom, my best friend Mark and probably two or three business associates (you know who you are). I wouldn't waste my time selling it for $29.95.

That is a hell of a lot different from selling a book that shows people how to make money on the Internet. People ordering are still going to have to create their own sites and do their own marketing. Not just push a button and make hundreds of thousands of dollars.

This is how all of them work: They have you track the numbers that have come up over the last six months and have you play the numbers that came up the most. This sounds great in theory but there is one major problemÙ IT'S NOT GOING TO WORK, AND HERE'S WHY:

People selling these systems would have you believe that the state's lottery equipment is just a bit off or just faulty. They would also have you believe that certain balls in the hopper are going to come up more often. That may be true, but the problem is that the variances are extremely small. The balls labeled 38 and 42 may have come up a few times more than 5 and 41 but that is going to happen in any random number drawing.

Especially when you are only looking at five or six month's worth of returns. If winning the lottery was just a matter of mathematics and simple number tracking, don't you think that every mathematician would have won it? Besides, lottery equipment is probably the most tested, watched and inspected machinery in the world. They have $1,000,000 to $100,000,000 or more riding on the outcome. You can bet they are going to make sure that everything is working properly.

If you want me to prove what I am saying, go buy one of those little lottery sets (you can buy them at gaming stores) and sit around and draw numbers for four hours. Write down all the results. Certain numbers are going to come up a bit more often than others. That doesn't mean that they are going to continue to come up. They just happened to come up a bit more often those times that you drew.

Remember that the odds of winning the big jackpot are very remote. When they have a big Power Ball Jackpot, you have a better chance of being hit by lightning three times than winning the Jackpot. I don't like those odds.

If you know two or three people who have been hit by lighting (and didn't get killed), you had better go and buy a ticket.

Matt Gagnon