Why you should play the Pick 4 Lottery

The primary goal of a lottery player is to win money. However, the motive behind this goal varies from person to person. Some do this to win a large jackpot, and to be set for life. Others play to supplement their income by trying to continually win smaller prizes. And, a smaller group are addicted gamblers, hooked on the thrill of winning regardless of the prize.

This article is aimed at the second group of players, i.e. those who play to supplement their income. These are the people who treat the lottery expenditures as an investment. Their objective is to continually win smaller prizes and not to lose any of their own money. Their mindset is similar to those who invest in options. They know that they will:

• lose a little,
• lose a little,
• make a lot!

Play Pick 4
To accomplish a viable cash flow of winnings, we suggest that playing the Pick 4 lottery game in your individual states.

While there are slight variations in cost and payouts, the basic format of the game is identical in most states. To win, the player must select 4 numbers that range from 0 to 9 in each of the positions. This means that there are 10,000 possible combinations. In general, the cost of each ticket is $0.50 and the payout is $2,500. And, in most states, the Pick 4 drawings are held twice a day, seven days a week.

In some states, the cost of the ticket is double ($1.00), but the payout is also double ($5,000). Further, many states pay out a fixed prize, and others determine the winning prize on a pari-mutuel basis. In these instances, we can still assume that the average payout per $0.50 spent is $2,500.

A Winning Strategy
To limit one's costs, we recommend that a player select only number that they wish to play. Then, we suggest that they play that number in every drawing until it wins.

By doing this, a player will be spending only $0.50 to win $2,500. Thay is a return of 5,000 to 1.

However, we recognize that the players number may not be drawn immediately. This means that the player will be spending $1.00 per day until it wins. This represents $365 per year and 700 drawings. If the number is not drawn for a while, the player has approximately 6.9 years (6 years 10 months) until he reaches the breakeven level (which is 5,000) drawings.

Comparison
To help understand this strategy, we have prepared the table and graphs below comparing the Pick 4 lottery game to Powerball (PB), Powerball with Powerplay (X PB), Mega Millions, Mega Millions with Megaplier (X MM), Lotto 649 (L6), Lotto Max (LM), and Pick 3. The charts only consider prizes in those games where the player matches 4 balls.  

	Cost per Ticket	Prize	Odds	Winnings per $	Return	Dwgs per Week	Weeks to Prize	Years to Prize	Cost per Year
Pick 4	$0.50	$2,500	10,000	$5,000	$0.25	14	357.1	6.9	364.0
PB 4/5+	$2.00	$10,000	648,976	$5,000	$0.02	2	2,500.0	48.1	208.0
PB 4/5	$2.00	$100	19,088	$50	$0.01	2	25.0	0.5	208.0
PB 3/5+	$2.00	$100	12,245	$50	$0.01	2	25.0	0.5	208.0
X PB 4/5+	$3.00	$40,000	648,976	$13,333	$0.06	2	6,666.7	128.2	312.0
X PB 4/5	$3.00	$200	19,088	$67	$0.01	2	33.3	0.6	312.0
X PB 3/5+	$3.00	$200	12,245	$67	$0.02	2	33.3	0.6	312.0
MM 4/5+	$1.00	$10,000	689,065	$10,000	$0.01	2	5,000.0	96.2	104.0
MM 4/5	$1.00	$150	15,313	$150	$0.01	2	75.0	1.4	104.0
MM 3/5+	$1.00	$150	13,781	$150	$0.01	2	75.0	1.4	104.0
X MM 4/5+	$2.00	$40,000	648,976	$20,000	$0.06	2	10,000.0	192.3	208.0
X MM 4/5	$2.00	$400	19,088	$200	$0.02	2	100.0	1.9	208.0
X MM 3/5+	$2.00	$400	12,245	$200	$0.03	2	100.0	1.9	208.0
L6 5/6	$2.00	$2,478	55,491	$1,239	$0.04	2	619.5	11.9	208.0
L6 4/6	$2.00	$87	1,033	$44	$0.08	2	21.8	0.4	208.0
LM 6/7	$1.67	$6,973	299,305	$4,184	$0.02	1	4,183.8	80.5	86.7
LM 5/7	$1.67	$138	4,751	$83	$0.03	1	82.8	1.6	86.7
LM 4/7	$1.67	$20	214	$12	$0.09	1	12.0	0.2	86.7
LM 3/7+	$1.67	$20	230	$12	$0.09	1	12.0	0.2	86.7
Pick 3	$0.50	$250	1,000	$500	$0.25	14	35.7	0.7	364.0

As you can see, the games with the highest return to the players are both the Pick 4 and Pick 3 games.



Next, we examine the Per Dollar Prize amounts. Here, we see that only 4 prize levels return as much money per dollar spent as that of Pick 4. These are the Powerball and Mega Millions payouts for matching 4 white balls and the Power or Mega ball.



Now lets consider the amount of time we have before we reach the $0 (zero dollar) profit level. Of the 6 prizes that exceed the 6.9 year level, total amount spent is substantially higher than the Pick 4 total of $2,500.



Lastly, we illustrate the yearly cost of purchasing one single ticket for each of the games. Here, we see that the Pick 4 and Pick 3 cost is highest. However, this is primarily a function of there being 14 drawings held in a week verses 2 for most games (and 1 for Lotto Max).



Summary
In summary, we believe that playing 1 Pick 4 combination continually in each drawing is a viable strategy for those lottery players looking to earn investment income at a relatively low and affordable cost!

JL ..............

Introducing the Lottery Probability Surface

In an effort to help players find a financially feasible strategy for playing the lottery, we discovered an important organization inherent in all lottery games.  By reducing all the combinations of a particular game into individual sum and range buckets, and then totaling those occurrences, have identified each game's "probability surface".

The surface is constructed using the only the primary white balls and not the bonus balls.  One axis of the surface consist of the Sum of all the balls.  And, the second axis is defined by subtracting the last ball from the first ball (the X and Y axis are interchangeable).

Doing this, for Pick 3 and 4 games which allow all selection for replacement, the resulting surface is that of a diamond. The reason for this pattern is that the last ball may be less than, equal to, or greater than the first ball, thus allowing the Range to progress from negative to positive values.  The illustration below is a 3-D view of the Pick 4 probability surface.

3-D Image of Pick 4 Lottery Probability Surface

For those games which do not have replacement (such as Mega Millions, Powerball, Lotto 649, Texas 2 Step, etc), we ignore the order drawn and sort the numbers from lowest to highest value. Doing this, we define a shape that is trapezoidal in shape. The illustration below is a 3-D view of the Texas 2 Step probability surface. This shape similar to that of Powerball, Mega Millions, etc. However, its scale is more condensed.

Texas 2 Step Lottery Probability Surface (3-D)

During the coming months, we will publish the probability surface characteristics for each of the lottery games that we cover.  In addition, we will be adding new analytic pages to our website summarizing the historical data of each game.

Our first application using this new discovery will be the Pick 4 games. We are well into the development of studying the New Jersey Pick 4 and hope to release this in the next few weeks. Following that, we will apply the same template to analyzing the Pick 4 games which we can easily obtain the complete drawing histories (California, Texas, North Carolina).

JL ..........

Lottery Power Picks turns 6 year old this September

This has been an exciting year for us at Lottery Power Picks. It began with the announcement that Powerball was going to change its format. With that, we wrote an analysis of the new format and projected anticipated jackpot growth. Along with that, we added a "Which Game Should You Play" page, and provided our users with a new 2012 Powerball playing guide (all of these are available on this blog).

Our overall suite of products (website and blogs) has consistently maintained a level of 5,000 page views a day throughout the year.  However, when the Mega Millions jackpot reached the $400 million level, we found that search traffic jumped dramatically. Our daily traffic at the peak for: the Lottery Power Picks website had a record level of 8,137 visits; our news blog had 265 visits; and this blog received 2,470 visits.

During that period, we realized a few important things about lottery related sites. First, we learned that when jackpots are low, consumer interest is also low. People only become fanatics when the jackpot levels reach the $200 million level. Second, we learned that all the information that we provide is sought after during high times. Third, although daily visitor levels are relatively low most of the time, it is important to be positioned for the extraordinary times. Lastly, we learned that our information is valuable.

This had brought new enthusiasm to us. And, we responded by re-writing our Lottery Power Picks website. Although this is not fully complete yet, we have released it beta.  We expect this to be fully functional in the upcoming months and will cut it over to our live site by the end of 2012.

Additionally, we have been working on a Pick 4 strategy that we believe will help you win those prizes. It differs from our Pick 3 strategy because the cost of playing too many combinations is not cost effective. We will release our Pick 4 pages and write a blog entry about this by Thanksgiving.

Lastly, our web hosting company moved our site to a new server last Spring. Since then, our up-time has been nearly 100%, and more importantly, hacking attempts have dropped to a minimum. This allowed us to spend less time monitoring the traffic and more time developing our lottery brand.

We wish to thank all of our users who visit us on a regular basis and have taken the time to write us and give us feedback.  Additionally, we thank Google for providing us with a wide range of development and monitoring tools, and helping us appear in search results.

We look forward to releasing our new website and analytical lottery coverage articles during the next year. Hopefully, one or more of us will win a jackpot prize as well!

JL ............