Icewynd said:
Well, I'm not sure that it is just limited to this forum, but yes. This seems to be a place where people come to find ideas and mine the wonderful archives for what is there, but never reveal their presence or share their own ideas.
I will never mind sharing my ideas because I have Ion Saliu to thank for him sharing his ideas for free on his site(*1). Understanding his fundamental formula of gambling was the starting-point, although I use a variation of it, in that whatever event I'm looking at, I work out the probability of it being 50% (what he refers to as the median), and then look to see if the results consistently better this, or not.
The problem I've been finding to date is that having tried several methods in the past, once I start testing them over a long period of draws, the results always end up fitting (or being worse than the calculated probabilities).
To summarize where I'm at now: I'm looking at the Irish Lottery, looking at only the numbers with a skip of 1 to 4 (4 being the median). The expected number of balls in each skip are
Skip 1: 7 (the last draw)
Skip 2: 6
Skip 3: 5
Skip 4: 4
I'm intending to investigate if e.g. skip 2 has 7 balls, rather than six, should I play doubles (21 permutations, bookmakers e.g. Ladbrokes pay 35/1 for a double).
I'm also going to look at the numbers that do occur in skips 1-4 and see if there are any patterns (e.g. one low (1-22) one high (23-45), or 1 even, 1 odd, or 1 that previously occurred within the last four draws, and one that didn't.
(*1)http://saliu.com/LottoWin.htm