Fonzy, I am absolutely motivated to use my skills to gamble and get ahead! That's why I'm using LM and UM!
I consider playing the lottery a hobby. Although I'm keeping stats and tracking the Fantasy 5, I only play when I believe I have an edge. I haven't bought any tickets since the 10th, that's three weeks ago. I go many weeks or even months without playing the lottery. (BTW, I have hit 4 out of 5 twice in Fantasy 5, and several times have won enough on 3 out of 5 to make a small profit.)
Generally, casino games are negative-expectation games, as are lottery games. Meaning the house always wins. Lottery games are particularly bad, because of the odds, and because of the takeout. State lotteries take around fifty percent of every dollar bet on the lottery for their operating costs, and to fund whatever. So if you play the Pick 3, the odds of hitting any three-number straight combination is 1 in 1,000. The payout for a $1 straight hit (this is in Florida, some states have parimutuel payouts) is $500. Therefore, you have to hit at at least twice the statistical rate just to break even.
Powerball, Mega Millons-the odds of hitting one of the big lottery jackpot games is astronomical. Fantasy 5 has the best odds of Florida jackpot games: 1 in 376,000. Also a problem with jackpot games is that lower-tier prizes are reduced in order to pump up the jackpot. Winning is near impossible, as is just breaking even. But if it is indeed your fate to win a large jackpot, then you just need to buy...one ticket!
However...I believe there are people out there who are making consistent profits, and possibly even earning their living at the “daily games”- Pick 3 and Pick 4. They treat it as their job, and really work at it.
http://www.nhlottery.org/Winners.aspx
This link will take you to the New Hampshire Lottery Winners page. Select game type “Draw” for July 2013. Scroll down until you find the name St. Pierre, Peter. You can see that he won $27,080 playing Pick 4 that month. I'm sorry that they have re-designed this page. The names used to be listed alphabetically, and the results went back to 2008. I went back month by month through 2008, and St. Pierre kept popping up fairly regularly (not every month) with hits of $800 to $6,000, with occasional hits of $20,000 to $40,000. All of this playing Pick 3 and Pick 4. Now you can only search back two years' worth of draws. But if you're interested, check it out.
There's two things we don't know about St. Pierre. One is, how much is he spending to get these hits? And the other is, is he getting smaller hits that he cashes at lottery retailers, instead of lottery offices? But I do know that he has been doing this for at least six years, which to me implies that he is realizing a nice profit, and possibly earning his living by gambling. It seems reasonable to assume that he has a system or method of play to achieve these wins.
My serious interest is playing the horses. I mentioned in post #7 that I finally realized that my inability to become profitable was a psychological problem (and I now add to that “errors in thinking.”) I purchased two books:
Gambling Wizards, and
Six Secrets of Professional Bettors. The subjects of these books are top-level professional gamblers. Their games of choice are horse betting (
Six Secrets of Professional Bettors is almost exclusively horse bettors) poker players, sports bettors, professional backgammon players (this was back in the day,) and blackjack players (this was before casinos clamped down on card counters. Card counting is a viable winning blackjack strategy.) Notice the lack of lottery players, and casino players (other than poker players who play at casinos.)
In
Six Secrets of Professional Bettors, some of the subjects had come to gambling from successful careers in the financial and business worlds. The type of attitude common to all of them is that they are entrepreneurs whose business is betting. Gambling is their profession, and once again, hard work is paramount. I believe it was pro gambler Amarillo Slim who declared gambling to be “a hard way to make an easy living.”