Did you know that there are lottery wagers that you shouldn’t waste your money on? You would be amazed at just how much trash there really is. But, sometimes even grown ups don’t like to take out the trash.

Once in a while I receive emails from players complaining about doing this. There are only a few but, they are reluctant to accept the need. They do this notwithstanding analysis by the best lottery software and irrefutable evidence to the contrary from every lottery. Bless their hearts, they are not going to let simple things like logic and reason get in their way.

Some of this trash can be identified as unbalanced wagers. The teeter-totter is responsible for the Balanced Wager name. Ahhhhh, that should bring back fond memories. Except when your partner hopped off and you were sore for a week. OUCH! Fun on the teeter-totter comes from maintaining balance.

That same lesson applies equally well to the lottery. A wager will lean to much to one side with too many low numbers. A wager will lean to much to the other side with too many high numbers. Understanding this simple analogy is important to the serious lottery player.

Finding the Garbage

Here’s the procedure to find the wagers you want to avoid. Add the numbers and find the sum. Any lottery will do but we’ll use Lotto Texas a 6/54 game. For the wager 1-2-3-4-5-6, the sum is 21. For any 6 number lottery, this is the minimum sum. For the wager 49-50-51-52-53-54, the sum is 309. This is the absolute maximum for a 6/54 lottery.

Now, we get down to brass tacks. The vast majority of lottery drawings turn out to be Balanced Wagers; neither tilting to far to one side or the other. So, spending your money on a wager near the minimum or maximum is probably not a very effective use of your lottery budget.

Are you still skeptical? Fair enough. Let’s make a graph of the sums for all 25,827,165 possible wagers for a 6/54 lottery. If you are willing to wait a few decades, we could use a hand calculator to make this graph. But, today it only takes seconds to create this graph using lottery software. Nothing speaks volumes better than a stunning graph.

Although, I can’t put the graph in this article, it’s one you have all seen before. It is referred to as a bell shaped curve.

Wagers with low balanced wager sums appear to the far left and wagers with high balanced wager sums appear to the far right. Between the two extremes is a big camels hump in the middle where most of the wager sums appear. The extreme limits on a bell shaped curve represent balanced wager sums that are highly unlikely to be the winning numbers. The graph speaks for itself and leaves any skeptics without much to say.

In fact, 90% of all possible wagers fall between 30% and 70% of the graph. The best lottery strategy would obviously be to not waste any of your lottery dollars on the very low probability wagers.

By doing so, this is what you gain:

1. You avoid spending your money on the least likely wagers.
2. Your lottery dollars are concentrated in the area where they are more likely to do some good.

Not only is this valid, actual lottery drawings back it up. Plotting the balanced sums of the actual winning numbers for Lotto Texas forms a perfect bell shaped curve. Nearly all of the lottery jackpot winners are found right in the middle of the graph.

Lotto Texas is not unique in this regard. All lotteries perform this way. I could have selected any of the 73 US and Canadian lotteries and the results would be the same.

If you’re still not quite sure then, try this. There are two lakes. Lake 1 contains 90% of the fish. Lake 2 has only 10% of the fish. So, tell me, which lake are you going to fish?

Warning: You won’t catch any marlin fishing in a mud puddle.