I heard someone say they applied “Scatter Theory” to the lottery when researching ways of improving your odds. They used the term in regard to statistics.
What is Scatter Theory? I couldn’t really find anything intelligible on the web.
Thanks,
J.
I only know of the term in reference to accustics and electrodynamics, where it refers to the resultant effects of wave or particle interactions; by analogy, when you throw a pebble into a pond, you get a predictable regular wave pattern; when you throw in two pebbles you get an interference pattern, et cetera.
With regard to playing the lottery the term is meaningless, as each lottery draw is statistically independent from ones that came before it or will come after it. There is no way to improve your odds; picking a range of disparate numbers is no more or less successful than picking the same range of numbers adjacent to each other.
Stranger
It’s perhaps being misapplied to the theory that a truly random selection of numbers is less likely to result in a jackpot being shared with others, and that if you choose them for example by meaningful dates then you’re more likely to match the numbers chosen by others.
Of course there is: buy more tickets. 
I’m going to guess that the author the OP referred to was talking about some manner of plotting which numbers had come up recently and which had not and were therefore “overdue”. The thought is that a truly random drawing would scatter the results in a particular fashion and so you could detect differences between what has happened and what should have happened, and those differences will help you predict the future outcomes.
It’s utterly fallacious bunkum, as Stranger pointed out.
That doesn’t mean it’s not highly profitable for the people selling systems to improve someone’s odds at winning a lottery. The lottery does a great job of exposing the typical humans’ utter lack of mathematical intuition or common sense.
The idea apparently is that you use ALL of the lottery numbers on your tickets. So in a 49 / 6 lottery, you’d need at least 9 tickets. You choose the numbers randomly for each ticket, but you don’t repeat any of the numbers already chosen on your tickets (until you have to).
The rationale is that, if your tickets don’t have ALL 6 winning numbers in them, you can’t win the jackpot. So by buying tickets in this way you guarantee that you’ll have a chance, since your collection of tickets will, by definition, contain all 6 winning numbers.
The term “scatter theory” was used in conjunction with this method.
J.
I wouldn’t necessarily count on a person who reasons like that being highly statistically literate.
This only applies to games with fixed payouts. With pari-mutual payouts, the more people that pick your number, the less you get. These include the main prize from big lotteries and many lesser prizes.
So, you want to pick numbers that other people are unlikely to pick. A random number generator is good enough. But there are those who think they can squeeze the last bit of hope out of a losing situation and pick numbers that are in some way avoided by others. If you have access to millions of picked numbers you might notice a trend, but then again any set of millions of numbers will have "trends’ that you can find. (The human mind is great at finding non-existent patterns.)
No matter what is going on, it all boils down to selling books to already proven gullible people.
No, what you’re referring to is called “cold numbers” – numbers that haven’t come up recently, so they “are due.” That’s not what this author is saying. See my other post for his actual idea.
J.
His actual idea is equally invalid, and for exactly the same reasons.
I’m guessing the way this lottery works is that a subset of 6 numbers is selected at uniform random from the 49 possible ones, and you win if you have a ticket with those 6 numbers on it?
This method doesn’t improve your odds at all over any other method where you purchase 9 tickets and none of them are exact repeats of another. [Obviously, it would be pointless to purchase a ticket which is an exact repeat of one you already have.].
There’s some total number of possible winning configurations, and your probability of winning is equal to the number of distinct configurations you own divided by that total. None of the details of what those configurations are matter; all that matters is how many of them you have.
In any method where you have 9 different tickets, your odds of winning will be 9/(the number of total possible tickets). There’s no way to change this with clever ticket selection. [For those who care about the details, in this case, the number of total possible tickets is nCr(49, 6) = 49!/(6! * (49-6)!), which is approximately 14 million. Each new ticket you buy makes your probability of winning go up by exactly the same amount, about 1/14 million, no matter what the ticket is (as long as it’s not an exact repeat), right up until you’ve purchased them all].
That still doesn’t impact your chances of winning, just the likelihood of not having to split the payment. One winning number split twenty ways is still more payoff than any number of wrong numbers.
Q.E.D. is correct; the only way to improve your odds is to purchase more tickets with independent numbers. It doesn’t matter, however, what those numbers are (as long as the combination is unique for each ticket); you have the same odds, and thus, the same cumulative odds, for any arbitrary combination of numbers, regardless of any previous selections.
Stranger
The same author used another phrase: “interpolated ration analysis”. I suspect he meant to type “interpolated ratio analysis”.
Does this phrase have a distinct meaning? Is there a specific mathematical operation corresponding to it? Or is it fancy words for an ordinary operation? (Similar to “waste disposal engineer” for a garbageman, for instance.)
Thanks,
J.
It could mean any number of things. But it’s probably just buzzword bullshit…
Another vote for buzzword bullshit.
As soon as the guy said anything that amounts to “clever number selection will increase your chances of winning a prize”, then 100% of what he has to say is pure BS, including the simple part I just said.
And once the whole thing is BS, it really doesn’t matter whether there’s a true statement, or valid terminology, used someplace in the middle. Throwing a 2+2=4, or even an E=mc[sup]2[/sup] in there doesn’t do anything to add truth to the utter BS of the guy’s thesis.
But it does sell books or website subscriptions.
The Master on lottery picks. Definitive with regards to ‘hot’ and ‘overdue’ numbers.
If I understand what jharvey963 said, what the system is claiming is to eliminate the possibility that you could have zero chance of winning due to the drawn numbers including one that you simply don’t have. Now I strongly suspect that that does not equate to any actual improvement in your chances, though I admit I can’t articulate a straightforward reason why.
I had a question to add: if by some miracle the lottery drew numbers that looked utterly non-random (1,2,3,4,5,6), would they toss the result because no one would believe it had happened fairly? Or because presumably some wiseacres will always pick numbers like that, and they don’t want a virtually guaranteed winner?
Because you need at least four of the winning numbers to get anything, and this system raises your odds of getting one of those combinations by a minute factor.
I actually ran simulations of this method versus random chance. I used some ridiculously large number of samples: 2.7 Billion, if I remember.
This method gave identical results to random chance. While it’s true that you’re guaranteed to have all winning numbers on your tickets, you’re also guaranteed to have only ONE copy of that number on your tickets. And this method tends to “scatter” them on the tickets.
Random picks often don’t have all 6 numbers, but sometimes they have more than 1 copy of the 6 winning numbers, giving some “concentration” of the winning numbers.
J.
I used to write Keno tickets in a casino where there were 80 balls and you picked anywhere from 1-20 balls with different payoffs for however many of the winning numbers were yours. I saw all manner of different theories and approaches and I ran every possible ticket through the machine and they all came back with the sad conclusion…the more balls you pick the greater the odds and the greater the payoff, the fewer the balls you picked the greater the chances of winning but, of course, for less money. It didn’t matter if you picked a few balls or a lot of balls or if you picked numbers that were all clumped together or scattered apart on the board or if you used birthdays or picked your numbers by astrology, pendulm or whatever, you will always be trying to out guess the numbers.
When I go to a casino I always play a 3-spot super that you have to get 3 out of 3 and it pays $150. I have three “lucky numbers” I use that come in just as many times as you lucky numbers, etc. so on and so forth.
In ten years in that field I have seen oddles and oddles of systems on all of the games all for nought. The guys with the best odds of winning are the ones that sell the systems whether it be in gaming, real estate or stocks.
somewhere inbetween because at the end of the year it all worked out the same the fewer