My family and friends say the same thing. I use my "play money" for lotto. I piss 20 grand in a month. Hell , I just paid 40 G in taxes yesterday.
Anybody else here study the lotto? I study patterns and the California lotto seems pretty shady. Only one winner in the last year and a half.
The drawing isn't even taped anymore.. Even small $1,000 payouts take 6 months to get paid now.
I've done it. The results fit the theories; for instance, the sum of the draws follows a Gaussian Curve (Central Limit Theorem).
The observed frequencies "match" the expected frequencies when running a Chi square test.
It's all good. They don't even need to cheat. Those games have an extremely high negative expected value, that's it, for every dollar you bet, you can expect to lose 0.9999 dollars. Even more, depending on the game.
Also, there's no point in trying to guess the winner numbers since those events are independent.
I guess that in some extraordinary cases, and as long as you knew the lotto business and the necessary statistics from the A to the Z, maybe then you could do some damage.
There are 2 well known cases. One of them involved a Stanford Prof of Statistics, and the other case a group of MIT students. But the general consensus is that they didn't "beat" the theory. Instead, they realized something was off with some lotto games.
