Can Longshots Increase Your Chances Of Winning The Lottery?

By Author: Darrel Dolph
Total Articles: 44
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Lottery players everywhere use a lottery strategy that is proven to provide them an edge. It takes advantage of lottery number patterns that occur in all lotteries. These lottery number patterns are called Longshots.

Let's start off with some history and a definition for people that don't know what lottery Longshots are. Several years ago a lottery strategy called the Hot Number Strategy reared it's ugly head. Along with it came the typical marketing hype that you would expect. It went something like this:

Since more than 80% of all winning lottery numbers Hit within the last 10 drawings, create your play list from the winners in the last 10 drawings. This will increase your odds of winning the lottery.

At first, it sounds plausible enough. But, let's look a little deeper. Implicit in this strategy is the opposite side of the coin. Any lottery numbers that haven't Hit in the last 10 drawings are considered a rather dubious pick. Hence, these lottery numbers were named Longshots. The name persists to this day and I even use it. But, I do not malign the use of Longshots. In fact, I applaud them. ...
... Including Longshots in a play list is an absolute necessity for any viable lottery strategy.

For all of those lottery players who got caught up in the Hot Number Strategy hype, this was, no doubt, a very expensive lesson. They spent a lot of money on lottery tickets and ended up without much to show for their investment.

The reason the Hot Number Strategy was such a disaster was because it excluded Longshots. Including Longshots is essential to any successful lottery strategy because, on the average, 25% to 40% of the winning numbers are Longshots! That's right; 25% to 40%.

This has been true for every lottery in the US and Canada for over 20 years. That's when I started analyzing them. The percentage varies depending on the size of the lottery. For example, the percentage is higher for a 6/54 lottery than it is for a 6/39 lottery. But, you can rest assured that this lottery number pattern is as solid as Mount Rushmore.

How can you verify this? Simple. Well, maybe without some excellent lottery software, not so simple. But, either way, this is the approach. List all of the lottery numbers that have Hit in the last 10 drawings for each lottery drawing. Any lottery number not in the list must be a Longshot. Count the number of winning numbers in the next drawing that were Longshots. Do this for the entire lottery history. If you average the number of Longshots that were winners, you will find the answer lies somewhere between 25 and 40 percent.

How can you take advantage of this information? Assuming that the answer you got was 30%, then, on the average, 30% of the winning numbers in the next drawing would be Longshots. If you were playing a 6/48 lottery, this means that you should expect 1.8 winning numbers to be Longshots. (30% x 6 = 1.8) Of course, this doesn't happen every drawing but it is unwaveringly persistent over time. For example, in Lotto Texas, at least 1 of the winning numbers is a Longshot 89% of the time! In other words, you can count on it.

This is why the Hot Number Strategy practitioners lost so much money. On the average, they consistently came up 1.8 numbers short in their play lists. It must have been (and still is) very frustrating for the players using this rather poor lottery strategy.

So, how can you take advantage of Longshots when you play. Continuing with the example above, it is very simple. For example, you decide to pare down a 48 number lottery to a 37 number play list with the help of lottery analysis software. Not a bad strategy since you have eliminated 9,946,728 wagers from play! Since you confidently expect 30% of the winning lottery numbers to be Longshots, you make sure that 11 of your 37 lottery numbers in your play list are Longshots. (30%x37=11.1)

This is how Longshots can increase your odds of winning the lottery jackpot. It is a lottery strategy used by serious lottery players everywhere. This is called playing the odds. Successfull gamblers do just that; play the odds.
Professor Dolph is the world-famous Lottery expert, lecturer and columnist who developed LONA, your LOttery Number Advisor. Go to Picking Lottery Numbers for a refreshing look at Lottery software.