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Quick Pick |
Evaluation Features |
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Game Set On Latest Draw |
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Game Set On Draw History |
Charting Features |
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Frequency 2D Chart |
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Frequency 3D Chart |
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Time-slice on a Number |
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Current Drought |
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Worst Drought |
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Profit and Loss |
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Timeline on a Number |
Analysis Features |
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Test Theory |
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Winning Pairs |
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Average Winnings |
The next three sections describe aspects of LottoCheck INFORM
which are essential for the user to understand, as they affect almost all
of the features of the program.
Each of these three lotto databases has two separate files: Draws and Prizes. Some features use just the winning numbers in the Draws file, some just the dividend data in the Prizes file, while other features such as the Evaluate options use information from both the files.
NOTE: If you change the Current Lotto Database during a session,
all of the MDI windows currently in operation are automatically closed
down. This is necessary because they are all relevant to the previous database.
The Days of week selection defaults to all days. Simply uncheck
those you wish to skip if you don't want all days.
The Current Game Set is the one used by LottoCheck INFORM for any features you choose thereafter.
The Evaluate features and some of the Chart and Analyse features make
use of the Current Game Set.
Numbers 1 to 45 are displayed within the dialog box, in a grid formation. You select your numbers by point-and-shoot mouse button clicking. De-selection is point-and-shoot too.
Selecting 6 numbers is a standard Game. To select a System entry, simply select from 7 to 20 numbers depending on what level of System you want. ie. Selecting 9 numbers on a single grid, gives you a System 9 (Nb You can only go as high as a System 18 on the NSW Lotto database, as that's the maximum System you can play in NSW Lotto competition).
When using both the Tattslotto (Australia-wide 6-From-45 lotto Bloc) and OZ Lotto databases in LottoCheck INFORM, you can also test games which have just 4 or 5 numbers selected. These are called Take 4's and Take 5's. When you purchase such a game via the lotto agency, they automatically combine your 4 numbers with all other possible combinations of two numbers to make up 820 standard 6 number games. For Take 5's they combine your 5 chosen numbers with the remaining 40 numbers to make up 40 standard 6 number games. Naturally you get charged accordingly. Take 4's and Take 5's are not valid when using the NSW Lotto database, because it is not something you can purchase in that competition.
Valid games for NSW Lotto range from 6 numbers through to 18 numbers, while the valid range is 4 numbers through to 20 numbers for OZ Lotto and the 6-From-45 Australia Lotto Bloc database. Any invalid games in your current Game Set, are ignored by the Evaluation features of LottoCheck INFORM.
Look at the buttons down the right side of the Game Set dialog box now. The Add, Delete, Next and Previous buttons refer to individual games in the one Game Set named and described here. This dialog box is for viewing and editing the ball numbers themselves.
When you are first building and testing a single game or a single System, we find it useful to have just one game in the one Game Set. Then when you are happy with that combination of numbers, it can be added to other games making up a larger Game Set.
To see the names and descriptions of other Game Set, or to select or create another Game Set, you click on the List button. It brings up the Game Set List box as seen here:
There are three columns of details: Game Set Name, Description and the number of games in each Game Set.
The width of these columns can be adjusted by placing the mouse cursor at the start of a column header and dragging it sideways. Your new column sizes are remembered in the following sessions.
The Edit button lets you modify the Name and Description fields of the Games-set currently highlighted.
The New button is what you click to create a new Game Set.
The Delete button lets you delete a whole Game Set of games, so be sure that's what you want to do before pressing it. However, you do get a chance to back out.
The Use button is the one that selects the Game Set currently
highlighted in the list, and makes it the current Game Set. It also
takes you back to the Game Set dialog box.
Quick Pick
If you are happy with the numbers generated, you can transfer them directly to your Current Game Set by a simple click on the Add to Current Game Set button. Alternate clicks on this button and the Go button, generates numerous games with your favourite inclusions and exclusions. By simply using the built-in flexibility of MS Windows, you can place the Game Set window beside the Pick window and watch each transfer, if you like.
Game Set On Latest Draw
Game Set On Draw History
The Criteria button gives you access to the Criteria Selection dialog box discussed earlier on.
The Speed drop-down-list gives you a fast or slow option.
When you pick the Slow speed option the coupon-like grid becomes a dynamically changing device. Your ball numbers in each Game in the current Game Set are circled, one at a time, while the six winning numbers for the draw currently being evaluated, are highlighted in a different colour. The two supplementary numbers are underlined.
The current Game Set is named in the field just above the row of buttons along the bottom of the window. To the right of that is the Game field. In Slow mode, you can observe the number of each Game in your Game Set tick over, per Draw evaluated. ie. As every Game within your Game Set is checked against the Draws winning numbers.
The Freeze drop-down-list lets you choose one of six display halting options:
The four columns below the coupon-like grid, display information for all 5 Prize Divisions. The first column with the title 'Prizes', displays how many prizes in each division were won by the current game on the current draw being displayed. Nb. The current Draw number is displayed just below the Freeze drop-down-list.
The second column with the title 'Amount ($)' shows you the actual dividends paid by the lotto agency, for the prizes displayed in the first column.
The third column titled 'Total' is the running tally (an accumulating total) of prizes won so far by the current Game Set, this far through the historical data. Remember that it is only on that part of the database which gets through the filtering conditions you've set via the Selection Criteria.
The fourth column is the running tally of actual dollars that were paid by the lotto agency, up to that point in the database, using the numbers selected in the current Game Set.
There are two boxes to the right of the 4 columns just discussed. The top one labelled 'Total Cost ($)' is a cost estimate of covering the current Game Set, over the number of draws so far evaluated. The draw count is shown in the top right box. The dollars are 'current dollars' ie. what it would cost you at todays rates of entry into lotto.
The box below that one, labelled 'Total Winnings ($)', is the sum of moneys from the 5 prize divisions displayed in the fourth column. These dollar are 'actual dollars' ie. what the lotto agency paid out at the time, for all the prizes that have been encountered by this evaluation run.
The box labelled 'Draws Since Last Prize' on the right side of the screen, is the current prize drought. Prize droughts are measured in the number of draws which have gone by, without winning any divisional prizes.
Below that is a box labelled 'Worst Prize Drought'. This is the worst prize drought so far encountered by the current Game Set, on the current database with the current Selection Criteria applied to it.
The group of buttons along the bottom gives the Evaluate screen an extraordinary degree of user-friendliness. The 'start' button begins the evaluation run, using the conditions you have already set up via the Criteria, Speed and Freeze controls. The Pause/Continue buttons are mutually exclusive: Pause stops the evaluation, then Continue is used to override the Pause. While the screen has been Paused you may go and change the options you selected in the Speed and Freeze drop-down-lists. However you can't reset the selection Criteria unless you first press the Stop button. ie. Changing the Selection Criteria effectively grabs a different subset of the Draws database, so the figures prize and amount figures already displayed on the screen would be irrelevant to the new subset of the Draws database.
The Retain button sends a report of the completed evaluation run to an MDI window, thereafter accessible via a Report MDI icon displayed in the bottom of the main LottoCheck INFORM window. ie. You can have numerous such evaluation Report windows open at once for cross comparison. Reports have their own distinctive MDI icon.
Note: If you change the current Game Set and the Evaluate window
is operational, all the computed tally data from the previous run is set
back to zero, so get into the habit of pushing the Retain button when your
evaluation runs are completed.
Frequency 2D ChartThe Selection Criteria dialog box is accessed via the Criteria button,
before a 2D Frequency Chart is drawn, so that you can select subsets of
the Draw databases.
Frequency 3D ChartThe result is a spectacular surface representation of the winning numbers over time, a virtual landscape of hills and valleys of lotto results. Using nothing more sophisticated then your own eyes, you can see trends at a glance. As numbers have gone 'hot', their accelerations as winners can be seen by the steepness of the virtual hills they help to form. Similarly, as numbers go 'cold', the hill in their vicinity flattens out.
The sheer amount of information being processed for this display puts considerable load on your PC so it can be a bit slow on older PCs. To minimise display time delays we recommend you always maximise the Frequency 3D window so that it occupies the full screen. Also, while you are not looking at it, we recommend you minimise it to an MDI icon. It can be opened again via 3D Frequency toolbar button, or by simply double clicking on the MDI icon at the bottom of the main window. If the Frequency 3D window is one of many on the screen, it will considerably slow down your activities, as every time you change something on the screen, the 3D chart goes through a screen refresh cycle.
As well as a Criteria selection button, the 3D Frequency feature has
a Zoom button which becomes selectable only after the initial full 3D displays
for all balls. The Zoom feature lets you examine 15 balls worth of the
3D landscape at a time. To move to the next or previous 15 balls worth,
use the scroll-bar on the bottom of the windows.
Time-slice on a Number
The Selection Criteria dialog box for this feature has an extra field - Ball Number - letting you select which one you want a time-slice on.
The MDI (multiple document interface) is particularly useful on this
feature, allowing you to do a number timeslices on numerous balls, each
in their own window, allowing cross comparison of trends visually.
Current DroughtThe Current Drought option displays the duration of current individual
droughts for all 45 balls, as a bar graph with 45 bars. The tallest bar
represents the ball that has gone longest without being amongst the winning
set. There will always be eight balls that have no bar on this graph, ie.
a zero length drought. They are the balls which were drawn as the winning
numbers in the last record of your Draws database. The Selection
Criteria can be used to look at Current Drought for either of
the weekly draws or both draws together. Note that it doesn't really
make sense to specify a small draw range of Draw numbers for this feature,
but if you do, the displayed drought can't be longer than the range
you've chosen.
Worst DroughtThe Worst Drought can't be longer than the range of the draw history
you've selected in the Selection Criteria dialog box. The Criteria most
often selected with Drought charts is Day of Week, as many people are only
interested in one or other of the weekly draws.
Profit and LossThe general trend on this graph is for it to descend step-by-step, then
to jump high vertically when a prize pay-out is encountered.
Timeline on a NumberIn LottoCheck INFORM, rather than events like 'The Battle of Hasting' on the line at year 1066, we have 'This ball was a winner' on the line at Draw Number 1305. It doesn't actually put such a text label on screen, just a uniformly sized coloured bar which represents the event 'This ball was a winner' in that particular draw.
Timelines are an excellent tool for seeing the regularity and irregularity
of balls being amongst the winners, in a very condensed and time-honoured
manner.
Test TheoryYou can use this feature to test several different subjective theories, over the same Draw history period, and compare them via the respective number of prizes each theory would have yielded.
To describe a theory to the LottoCheck INFORM program, you first have to understand the statistical concept of Rank, as you specify a theory via ball Ranks, not by ball numbers.
As Test Theory passes through the database it calculates what is called the Rank of each ball. This simply means it ranks them according to how many times they have been drawn in the past. The ball that has been drawn the most times, so far (ie. up to the draw being processed) is called Rank 1, while the ball that has been drawn the least is Rank 45 (or Rank 44 in NSW Lotto), and so on for those ball numbers in between.
Something you need to be aware of, is that these Ranks change as time goes by - and as the analysis passes through the database. For example the number that was most frequently drawn a year ago may have been over taken by another number this year. While Ranks do change, the best and the worst Ranks tend to change more slowly than the middle order Ranks.
Often two or more balls have been drawn the same number of times. In this case the convention LottoCheck INFORM follows, is that the first ball of the two (the lowest number) gets assigned the lower Rank, and so on.
The Test Theory feature uses the Current Game Set, but unlike the Check Numbers features, Test Theory treats the numbers in a Game as Ranks not as ball numbers. Therefore, you should keep distinct Game Sets for Test Theory runs and it is good practise to put only one Game in such a Game Set.
Using the Ranks you've specified in the Game Set, LottoCheck INFORM checks to see which balls have those ranks and it then cross-checks those ball numbers with the winning numbers to tally up the prizes, that would have been won. The Test Theory results screen looks very much like that for Game Set on Draw History evaluate screen, but remember it is basing it calculations from Ranks of balls, not via ball numbers held constant over time.
As the Test Theory feature steps sequentially through the database of draws, it computes Ranks 1 through 45, at each draw, then uses your Game of Ranks to predict the winning balls in the next draw. It then compares the prediction with the actual winners in that draw, and tallies up prizes accordingly. In this way LottoCheck INFORM simulates what numbers would have been chosen by Test Theory if it had been used each and every week throughout the time period covered by the draws database, to predict the winning numbers for each following draw.
A point worth noting here, is that the testing of a particular strategy
does not start until 25 draws into the range you specified. Prior
to this the Rank's would be fairly useless. One difference between the
on-screen numbers for this feature and that for Check Numbers is that at
the very end of testing a theory the last set of numbers circled on the
grid, are the numbers it predicts will win the next draw,
according to the Ranks you've given it in the last Game in your Game Set.
"Think of the Rank of the balls as similar to that of a football ladder during the season. Rank 1 is the top team. Rank 45 is the bottom team in a very big (future) AFL. Lets say you 'have a theory' that the teams with the top 6 odd numbered Ranks (ie. positions 1,3,5,7,9,11 on the ladder) at any given week throughout the season, are most likely to be the winners the next week! (an unlikely theory I'll admit, but it is only to suit the explanation).
Let's say you had the results of all games in the previous season, with which you wanted to test this odd ranks theory. What you would do, would be to: step through the results week-by-week; look at the league ladder for that week; pick out the teams that were oddly ranked from the ladder for that week; then see if they really did win the next week; if they did, you would add the win to an accumulating total (a running tally), otherwise the tally would stay the same; then you would move on to the next week and do the same all over again. This would continue until you have gone right through all of last years football results.
Then you could test a second theory (say the Top 6 teams on the ladder ie. Rank 1,2,3,4,5,6) - are most likely to win the following week. You would follow the above process, then compare this theories "win" tally with that for the first theory, to see which was the better theory. The theory that picked the most game winners for a season is clearly the best, and the one you would choose to use in the future..
Now, in your mind, replace the 45 teams in the fictional football ladder, with balls 1 to 45. ie. teams become balls. Ranks are still Ranks, but rather than the top Ranking team being the one that has won the most games, it is the Ball which has been amongst the prize winners, most often. Instead of having last seasons results to test your theories, you have all continuous past draws up to last weeks winners.
The Check Numbers feature then, is like picking the winners by name
eg. The "Brisbane Bears" to win. While Test Theory feature is about picking
next weeks winners by whoever occupies a certain position on the league
ladder at that point in time. ie. Last weeks top 6 ladder position holders,
whoever they are - to win.
Winning Pairs
The counts are displayed in one of three colours on the screen, with the following significance: Blue - pairs occurring at about the average you would expect; Red - above average counts; Black - below average counts.
As well as the Criteria button this feature has a Scroll
button to view the second half of the table, as it won't all fit on the
screen at the one time.
Average WinningsThey also produce useful figures for comparing with individual draws which seem particularly skewed - as per the draw which had 85 first division winners mentioned later on in the Strategies chapter.
Note: This page is an edited extract from the User Manual from our 'LottoCheck
INFORM V2 for Windows' software package.
[Return to Product LottoCheck INFORM V2 Home Page]
Contact/Feedback:
ABN: 60 084 786 498
Postal Address: P.O. Box 218, Belgrave, Victoria 3160, Australia
Phone/VoiceMail: +61 0407 544 260
Email: gosh@solidsoftware.com.au
This page last updated: 15th January 2003.
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