Best Practices

Re-use your Numbers

Winning probability is the portion of draws that your numbers will win, out of all the draws a game can have. Since every possible draw is considered, past draws are meaningless as your numbers do not change their portion/likelihood over time. Therefore, if you have a high probability set, it makes sense to use it over and over again. Even if it wins, its likelihood will never change (unless the game rules change).

Don't Share Numbers

Most major lotteries split the larger prizes by the number of winners. Every time you share your numbers, you reduce your potential winnings and the potential winnings of every one you share with. If 10 family members all win big at the same time, they may only receive one tenth of what could have been, had they all won at different times. This is fundamentally the same as winning multiple times on the same set as described in Theory.

Give Everyone Unique Numbers

Although LT generated numbers almost always outperform randomly generated ones, LT's numbers do have a random component, making it extremely unlikely that any two generated tickets (of reasonable length and game size) are ever the same. Therefore, if you want to give better numbers to friends and family, do so by finding out how many rows they play and purchase them their own unique set.

Pool From One Large Set

If the plan is to share any winnings amongst a group, use a single set with the total number of rows that will be played. Then portion out the set's rows amongst the group. This gives a better overall spread than combining separately generated sets. Note however, individual portions of larger LT sets have less spread than separate LT sets for the same portion length - so don't do this unless winnings are shared amongst its members.

Example

The advice above wouldn't have much value if it couldn't be verified in some way. For this example, we will be using the same Pot Luck lottery as described in Theory. The tickets used can be found at the bottom of the page. They were generated using an early version of LotteryTester.com. Below are the results comparing the single 20 row set (20) with two combined, yet separately generated 10 row sets (A and B).

Here the 20 row set outperforms the two independent 10 row sets. The difference is only small because the coverage is high. Examining harder games or looking at division 4 reveals the difference can be significant.

The tables below represent the opposite use case, where the 20 row set is cut into two and all four sets are compared.

The tables above clearly show that sets sliced from a larger set perform more poorly than sets generated specifically for each slice length. The difference here appears more significant than the first table because the overall coverage is less. In any case, this example shows that, when prizes will be shared amongst a group, it is best to generate one large set for the entire group, as the overall coverage is higher. Otherwise it's best to generate separate sets for each individual, as each set benefits from a higher coverage.