Musings On Extended Diversification

To my mind losing is always better than never trying, because you can never tell  what may happen.
Jean Chretien, Straight From The Heart, p. 195

Every year in Canada due to the two national lotteries there could be created up to 154 new millionaires per year! But due to the prizes building from week to week and not being won and then having, say, a 40 million dollar prize go to a group of 35 people, you could on average count on 154 as being a pretty stable estimate.
Now this is not counting the smaller provincial lotteries that often award prizes over a million dollars. So therefore the number of newly minted millionaires could climb to over 200 in any given year.

Is this process solvable??

Take a six column 1 to 49 drop ball lottery. The odds to beat can be as high as 1 : 15,000,000 or more depending on variations built into the game. The Oracle of Ottawa often ponders how so much randomness can be squeezed into such a small 'space'. Now essentially this is a closed process. Yet it is deemed in all the texts as fruitless to even begin thinking about a way to 'solve' this process.

William Feller - Made math cool...

I often tell any youngsters that will listen, and there isn't many, that the most exciting field they could probably enter is the mathematical field of probability. If you want to get the biggest bang for your education nickels a degree in probability and statistical inference would be a fine place to start. For a life long pursuit that will have many more doors open as the future unfolds, all very hard to beat...

Is this data random? - Can you prove it?

 For example take the old card shuffling problem. This is a problem that is still yielding really weird and totally unexpected results! Who knew? But for a mere mortal or a really sharp kid read about one William Feller!
If you can get hold of a copy of 'An Introduction to Probability and Its Applications, Volume I, just dip in any where... You will soon find why that it is regarded as the greatest book on probability ever written. Why the bit on coin tossing is still rippling through the world. Some of the stuff in that book is so weird and so totally unexpected that it is at first read just incredible.... But the best piece of gold I mined from this work is to break the process down into smaller independent processes... Try it before you scoff...

Yes, all that is all very interesting, but these games are for silly poor people and ignorant rubes... A middle class or better off person does not buy lottery tickets or bet on sports, or go to the track or the card tables at the local casino... Well not so fast! And I have a reference! You should budget a very small amount for such things! See 'Investments' by Sharpe, Alexander, Bailey and Fowler, Second Canadian Edition, Chapter 26.   
Read this carefully. You can't win if don't have a ticket!

Many professional Mathematicians have been clobbered by this one! Now do you see the power?