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Lottery Wheeling Systems

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What is a Wheeling System?

Wide popularity of lotteries have produced numerous systems that aim at reducing lottery odds. Wheeling is perhaps the most popular of all.

Wheeling System is in effect a way of organising lottery ticket numbers. It is designed to help lottery players to improve their chances of winning multiple-tier prizes.

Wheeling is suitable for the players who would like to play with a larger amount of numbers than the set required for a lottery ticket. For example, most of the popular US lotteries would ask a player to enter 5 or 6 numbers in the lottery ticket. However, a player might want to play with 7 or more different numbers.

In this case wheeling systems will apply various mathematical formulae to arrange a group of numbers a player selects into various combinations that would give either full or partial coverage of all possible combinations of numbers selected.

One of the popular examples of wheeling is about some Polish-Irish businessman named Stefan Klincewicz who bought up almost all of the 1,947,792 combinations available at the Irish lottery. He and his associates paid less than one million Irish pounds while the jackpot stood at £1.7 million. Ironically however, one of the few combinations he did not cover was a winning one. He still managed to cover three winning tickets with the "Match 4" and "Match 5" prizes. Surprisingly though, Klincewicz made a small profit overall.

Generally speaking, chances to win a jackpot of a popular lottery are quite low. Among the most popular US lotteries odds currently range from 1:176 million in Mega Millions to 1:11 million in Michigan lottery to mention a few.

The aim of the wheeling systems is to improve the players’ odds. Wheeling systems do not target at winning the main jackpot of the lottery. However, they aim at winning smaller prizes provided some or all of the winning numbers the player wants to wheel are present at the lottery’s winning numbers set.

The wheel made for a lottery player who would like to play with 8 numbers (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8) in a Pick 6 lottery will have 28 combinations in total. However, these combinations will include all permutations of eight selected numbers. The example mentioned is outlined below.

Ticket Number
Wheel
1
1
2
3
4
5
6
2
1
2
3
4
5
7
3
1
2
3
4
5
8
4
1
2
3
4
6
7
5
1
2
3
4
6
8
6
1
2
3
4
7
8
7
1
2
3
5
6
7
8
1
2
3
5
6
8
9
1
2
3
5
7
8
10
1
2
3
6
7
8
11
1
2
4
5
6
7
12
1
2
4
5
6
8
13
1
2
4
5
7
8
14
1
2
4
6
7
8
15
1
2
5
6
7
8
16
1
3
4
5
6
7
17
1
3
4
5
6
8
18
1
3
4
5
7
8
19
1
3
4
6
7
8
20
1
3
5
6
7
8
21
1
4
5
6
7
8
22
2
3
4
5
6
7
23
2
3
4
5
6
8
24
2
3
4
5
7
8
25
2
3
4
6
7
8
26
2
3
5
6
7
8
27
2
4
5
6
7
8
28
3
4
5
6
7
8

Full Wheel

Among the countless lottery systems available on the Internet full and abbreviated wheel are perhaps the most popular.

A full wheel has all the possible combinations that can be created with the set of numbers a player selects. For example, if you were to chose any 3 numbers from 1,2,3,4 the full wheel would look as follows:

 Ticket Number
Full Wheel
1
 1 2 3
2
 1 2 4
3
 1 3 4
4
 2 3 4

Full wheel would be suitable for the players who would like to receive maximum coverage of the prizes. Provided all of the lottery winning numbers are in the group the player selects, he would hit the lottery jackpot and additional prizes. Should he have only some of the winning numbers in his set, he would be guaranteed to have multiple prizes.

On the other hand, however, full wheels are quite expensive to play with. A player, who wants to play with 10 numbers in the Pick 6 lottery will receive 210 combinations in a full wheel while 15 numbers for a same kind of lottery will give him as much as 5005 combinations.

Abbreviated Wheel

An Abbreviated Wheel is an economical alternative for a full wheel and is therefore quite popular among the players. Abbreviated Wheels won’t cover all possible combinations, however, it will guarantee at least one winning ticket, if a certain amount of numbers drawn fall within the wheeled number set.

An example below wheels 8 numbers (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8) for a Pick 6 lotto game. As opposed to a Full Wheel an Abbreviated Wheel for 8 numbers will only require 7 combinations, hence, only 7 tickets will need to be purchased. If 4 of the 6 winning numbers are among the 8 numbers the player wheels, he will have at least one successful combination matching 4 winning numbers.

 Ticket Number
Abbreviated Wheel
1
1
2
3
4
5
7
2
1
2
3
6
7
8
3
1
2
4
5
6
8
4
1
3
4
5
6
8
5
1
4
5
6
7
8
6
2
3
4
5
6
7
7
2
3
4
5
7
8

The main reason behind opting for abbreviated wheel is that it saves money still retaining reasonable chances to win second-tier prizes. As it saves money it creates an opportunity to buy more tickets, pick more numbers, hence, increases chances to win even more.

Key Number Wheel

The main difference between the abbreviated wheel and the key number wheel is that some number, special to a player, will appear in every combination of the wheel. Key number wheel would normally have fewer combinations than abbreviated wheel.

To win with Key number wheel 2 conditions need to be met:

  • Winning numbers must be among the numbers the player wheels;
  • The "key number" has to be among the winning numbers drawn.

An example below wheels 8 numbers (1,2,3,4,5,6,7 and a KEY number) for a 4-of-4 win in 5 combinations. The wheel looks pretty similar to the abbreviated wheel except that the player has to insert his KEY (special) number in every combination.

Ticket Number
Wheel
1
KEY
1
2
3
4
6
2
KEY
1
2
3
5
7
3
KEY
1
4
5
6
7
4
KEY
2
3
4
5
7
5
KEY
2
3
5
6
7

 

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