Index

What are Lotto Wheels?

The best way to explain what Lotto Wheels are is showing an example. The following example considers very few numbers and is very basic for easier comprehension. Nevertheless, it can be easily generalized with more numbers because the concepts are the same.

Let's consider a very simple lotto game. Let's call it SimpleLotto. It has a total of 5 balls and only 3 are drawn every week. Now, please think of 3 numbers from 1 to 5...
The numbers you choose are for sure one of the following combinations (or boards):

1 2 3
1 2 4
1 2 5
1 3 4
1 3 5
1 4 5
2 3 4
2 3 5
2 4 5
3 4 5

These 10 combinations can already be called a Lotto Wheel. In this particular case it's called a "Total" Wheel because it contains all possible combinations. If you play with all these 10 boards you always get the first prize (and several second prizes)! Unfortunately, the more balls a game has, the more combinations there are, making the first prize much more difficult.
For example, if SimpleLotto had 50 balls instead of 5, the number of combinations would raise to 19600 instead of 10! Another more drastic example is the classic Lotto that has 49 balls and draws 6 - in this case the total of combinations is 13983816!

Coming back to SimpleLotto, suppose that each bet is really expensive and playing with 10 boards is a lot of money. You want to play with fewer boards, but, instead of guaranteeing the first prize you only want the second prize (2 numbers right). You can do that using a "Partial" Wheel. This type of Wheel does not contain all possible combinations but only some, chosen in a way to guarantee the second prize. For example, if you play with the following boards:

1 2 3
1 4 5

Whatever 3 numbers are drawn, one of these boards will have (at least) 2 right numbers. Please confirm.
The choice of the right combinations follows rigorous mathematical methods. Due to the complexity of this problem, when we consider a lot of numbers, these methods can guarantee the prize you want, but they cannot guarantee that the number of combinations is the minimum possible. That's why different methods can give different sets of combinations.

If you understand the previous example well, we can generalize to another more real example. Suppose another game called NormalLotto with a total of 50 balls drawing 5 balls every week. The total number of combinations for this game is 2118760. This makes playing for the first prize really expensive! Lotto Wheels can really help you to play in a smart way in this situation.

What you can do is choose some numbers and make a Lotto Wheel. For example, you could choose your 10 lucky numbers and guarantee that if the 5 numbers drawn were in your 10 numbers, then, you get the first prize. This is what is called a Wheel of 10 numbers guaranteeing "5 in 5". For that you would have to play with 252 boards.

Now, let's assume that even so, 252 is still too much money for you. Then, you could do another Wheel with the same 10 numbers, but with less ambitious conditions. For example, if the 5 numbers drawn are in your 10, instead of the first prize, you only want to guarantee 4 right numbers. This is what is called a Wheel of 10 numbers guaranteeing "4 in 5". In this case you would need 14 boards!

Let's verify that. Suppose you choose the following 10 numbers (from 1 to 50):
    4 10 12 17 25 31 32 35 47 50

If you play with the 14 boards below, whatever 5 numbers are drawn, if all 5 are in the 10 you chose, at least one of the following 14 combinations will have at least 4 right numbers. Please try it!

  4 10 12 17 25
  4 10 12 35 47
  4 10 17 32 47
  4 10 25 31 47
  4 12 17 32 35
  4 12 25 31 35
  4 17 25 31 32
  4 31 32 35 47
10 12 31 32 50
10 17 31 35 50
10 25 32 35 50
12 17 31 47 50
12 25 32 47 50
17 25 35 47 50

Another example would be to play with 20 lucky numbers. If you want to guarantee "5 in 5" in this case, you need 15504 boards. On the other hand, to guarantee "4 in 5" you need only 463.

There are other types of guarantees, like "3 in 3". For the previous example, this guarantee means that if from the 5 numbers drawn only 3 are in your 20 lucky numbers, you still get 3 right numbers. To guarantee this you need 133 boards.

Can you already understand what means a guarantee of "3 in 4"? Ah! And you can also combine guarantees, for example, "3 in 3" and "4 in 5".

Try TheLottoSite! You'll see how simple is to use and by using it you'll understand all of this really fast!

Wanna bet?

Wizard - Create a new Wheel

The creation of a new Wheel, or the edition of an existent one, is guided by a Wizard composed by 5 simple steps. Each of these steps is described below on the following sections.

To move to a next step, you have to press the button "Next". Obviously, if you want to move back to the previous step, you have to press the button "Previous".

Step 1: Choose game

In the first step of the Wizard you have to choose the game with which you want to create your Wheel. TheLottoSite has a list of pre-defined games. If the game you want is not on the list, you can create it yourself. The page has a link to jump to the page Manage Games where you can create a new game and save it. After creating it, you can come back to the Wizard, and your game will already be on the list.

Step 2: Choose numbers

In this step, you have to choose your lucky numbers. All boards of the resulting Wheel will be combinations of these numbers.

You have 2 options to choose the numbers:

• Clicking on the numbers: the numbers you click are marked green. Clicking again, unmarks it.
• Random: the computer can draw the numbers randomly. To do this, you have to select how many numbers you want and press the button "Random".

The number displayed in front of "Total numbers selected:" tells you how many numbers are chosen currently (the ones marked in green).

Step 3: Define guarantees

A guarantee defines how many numbers n you want to have right (minimum) in case you "catch" m numbers of the drawn combination. Obviously, n must always be less or equal to m.

Any Wheel must have at least one guarantee. On the other hand, you can define more than one guarantee pressing the button . The button removes the guarantee next to it.

When you have more than one guarantee, a join between them is made. For example, if you define the guarantees "3 in 3" and "4 in 5", means that the Wheel will guarantee 3 right numbers if you catch at least 3 and also guarantees 4 right numbers if you catch at least 5.

Step 4: Define filters

Filters are a very powerful tool to reduce the number of boards in your Wheel. They work together with the guarantees defined in the previous step to introduce more restrictions to the Wheel being generated.

For example, if you verify that, most of the time, the drawn combinations have between 2 and 4 even numbers, you can define a filter that removes all combinations that don't have at least 2 and at most 4 even numbers. This will reduce the number of combinations for the solution, but obviously, if the drawn combination has 5 even numbers, the guarantees defined on the previous step will not be valid any more.

You don't have to define filters, but you can define more than one. Like with the guarantees, the button adds a filter. The button removes the filter next to it. Also, like the guarantees, it's made a join between the filters.

Besides the described buttons, there's also the button . If you move your mouse over this button, you get a summary of the filter next to it.

The option "Result compatible with filters" indicates if all the combinations of the solution have to verify the filters too. It may seem incredible, but applying the solution as a whole can guarantee the filters, while some boards of the solution may not be compatible with the filters! More - if you turn this option off, the solution contains normally much less combinations! This is a bit hard to explain and understand, so, if you don't understand it completely you should leave this option on.

These are the filters available:

Even numbers	Minimum and maximum of even numbers in each board
Odd numbers	Minimum and maximum of odd numbers in each board
Consecutives	Minimum and maximum number of times that n consecutive numbers show in each board. The number n is defined by the parameter "Length".
Distance	Minimum and maximum distance between consecutive numbers
Range	Minimum and maximum distance between the first and last number of each board
Sum	Minimum and maximum of the sum of all numbers of each board
Low numbers	Minimum and maximum of low numbers in each board. A number is low if it belongs to the first half of the total of numbers - for example, if the total of numbers is 49, a number is considered low if it is between 1 and 24.
High numbers	Minimum and maximum of high numbers in each board. A number is high if it belongs to the second half of the total of numbers - for example, if the total of numbers is 49, a number is considered high if it is between 25 and 49.
Terminations	Minimum and maximum of numbers with the same termination; and minimum and maximum of different terminations in each board. The termination is the last digit of a number - for example, the termination of 25 is 5.
Decades	Minimum and maximum of numbers with the same decade; and minimum and maximum of different decades in each board.
Rows	Minimum and maximum of numbers within the same row; and minimum and maximum of different rows in each board.
Columns	Minimum and maximum of numbers within the same column; and minimum and maximum of different columns in each board.
Group	First you have to select a sub-group of the numbers you chose to your wheel. Then define the minimum and the maximum of numbers of that group you want on each board.

Step 5: Name the Wheel

In the last step of the Wizard, you give a name to your Wheel and select the calculation method to be used.

The name is only a reference for the user who created it, and therefore, shall be well descriptive. TheLottoSite doesn't validate the name in any way; you can even have repeated names between different Wheels. Managing these names is entirely user's responsibility.

The calculation method defines the way the wheel is going to be calculated. Different methods may produce different solutions, and depending on the situation, the number of boards may be smaller in one or the other. TheLottoSite has the following methods:

Distributed Numbers	This method tries to distribute the numbers over the wheel boards in an uniform way. The number of times that each number appears on the wheel and the pairing with other numbers shall be uniform. This method produces prettier wheels, but is slightly slower.
Optimized	This method tries to optimize the solution without considering any uniform distribution, on the contrary, there's normally some numbers and pairs that show more times. It's faster and most of the times find solutions with fewer boards.
Super Fast	This method is the fastest of all (much more!), but the solution will have a bigger number of boards, most of the times. It should be used specially for wheelings with a lot of numbers and with guarantees where the minimum is much smaller than the maximum (for instance, 3 in 6), where the other methods are much slower.

To start the calculation of the Wheel, the user has to press the right arrow. Then, it moves to the Progress Bar page.

Progress Bar

The Progress Bar shows how much of your Wheel was already calculated and how much is still to go. You can also cancel the calculation - this marks the Wheel with percentage -1. You can edit it, change the parameters and recalculate it.

When the calculation finishes, the result is shown automatically to you in View boards

List Wheels

In this page, you can find a table with all the Wheels you created so far. Each line of the table contains a summary of each Wheel.

The Wheels are grouped by game. The game selection box contains all games for which you have a Wheel created.

You can sort the Wheel list by clicking on the title of each column. Clicking once, you get ascending order, clicking again you get descending order. While you click, the orders alternate. A triangle drawn at the left of the respective title indicates the current order.

You can also execute several operations over each Wheel. Moving the mouse over the name of a Wheel, displays a menu with all the operations you can execute. Those operations depend on the Wheel being finished or not. A finished Wheel has the percentage at 100% written in black. When a wheel is still being calculated, its percentage is less than 100% and is written in red.

The possible operations are described next:

Finished Wheels

View boards

This operation shows all the attributes of the selected Wheel and the list of all the boards you have to play. The boards are sorted and numbered for easy reference. They are also grouped by the number of boards per play splip.

You can print this page to ease the manual filling of the play splips. If you have a printer, you can print the play splips directly. See how on the next topic.

Print

This operation shows you a printing preparation screen. The printing is done by generating a PDF file (Portable Document Format), with a play splip on each page. By using PDF files we can allow our users to print using virtually any printer. However, we can't help you with the paper feeding and orientation of the printer. For more information check your printer's manual.

The creation of the PDF file with marks for the boards takes into account displacement values (one horizontal and one vertical) given by the user for manual adjustment. This displacement is a real or integer number, positive or negative, in millimeters, eg, -5 or 1.6. These displacement values are saved and recovered the next time you'll print play splips for the same game. After defining these values, click the green arrow to create the PDF file.

After creating the file, your browser will open your PDF reader. If you have no reader installed we recommend you install Adobe Reader. You can install Adobe Reader by following this link.

If this is the first time you try to print, we recommend that you print only one page and check. If the marks are not precisely aligned, you shall do Back to return to this page and define the displacements. If you want the marks to move to the right, you have to define how many millimeters you want on the horizontal displacement. If you want it to move to the left, insert a negative number. You can do the same for the vertical displacement. A positive number moves it up and a negative number moves it down.

If you use Adobe Reader, there are two options that you need to change in the print dialog

• switch off option Auto-Rotate and center
• select none in Page scaling

Some printers have a printer driver that scales whatever document you're printing to the defined paper size. If you think that your printer has such functionality you need to switch it off. Still in the printer dialog click in Properties button and check all your driver settings. Such option is often called scale to fit.

Printing in portrait format is usually better. However, you can try and print in landscape if you have troubles feeding play splips to the printer. Printing in landscape often gives problems since the right margin on some play splips is quite small.

After successfully printing your first play splip you can print them all at once. Most printers will have no problems handling multiple play splips in the automatic feeder. This will make printing amazingly easy.

If the game of the selected wheel does not support printing yet, it's because we don't have any play splip of that game to configure the system.

If you send us a scanning in real size of a play splip to our email, we can configure the system to support that game. Usually the configuration is performed in less than one week.

Edit

This option allows you to modify all attributes of the Wheel selected. This is done with the same Wizard used to create it.

Results

With this operation, you can easily verify what prizes you got with your Wheel. You'll have to enter the drawn numbers first. Then, you go to another page with a summary of the Wheel, a summary of all numbers you got right and a detailed list of all boards with the right numbers signaled per board.

Delete

This option deletes the selected Wheel. A confirmation is asked, because you cannot undo it.

Wheels being calculated

Cancel the calculation

This operation cancels the Wheel calculation.

Show Progress

This option jumps to the page with the Progress Bar of the chosen Wheel.

User Settings

This page allows you to consult and modify the user settings. One of the most important settings is the password. You can re-define it, and for that, you have to enter the old password and the new password twice for confirmation.

If your user profile is not the most powerful, you can upgrade it on this page. More powerful profiles increase the capabilities you can use from TheLottoSite.

Manage Games

This page allows you to consult, modify and create games. The best way to understand the meaning of the attributes is to consult a known pre-defined game's settings and see how they are filled.

A pre-defined game cannot be edited or deleted. To create a new game you have to select the option "++Create new game++" in the game selection list.

You can only delete games created by you and that don't contain any Wheel. If you want to delete one of your games containing Wheels, you have to delete all the Wheels of that game first.

The attributes of a game are the following:

• Name of the game: The name of the game you are editing/creating. Cannot be repeated with any other game.
• Number of boards per play slip: The number of boards each play splip has. For example, the play splips for Mega Millions have 5 boards.
• Cost per board: The amount to pay per board.
• Currency: The currency used for the game. Can have up to 5 characters

A game has to have at least one component. A component is a separated group of numbers. For example, Mega Millions has 2 components (56 white balls + 46 mega balls). You can add up to 3 components by pressing the button . Can also remove it with the button .

Each component has the following attributes:

• Component name: (optional) the name how the component is known.
• Total of numbers: The total number of balls for the component. For example, the "White Balls" component of Mega Millions has 56 balls.
• Numbers of balls per draw: The number of balls drawn for the component. For example 5 in the "White Balls" component of Mega Millions.
• Numbers picked per draw: The number of numbers to pick on each board for the component. In most of the games this is the same as the number of balls drawn
• Numbers per board row: The length of each row on each board in the play splip. Again, the "White Balls" have 9.
• Direction: The direction of the rows of consecutive numbers on each board.

Below there's the list of all pre-defined games in TheLottoSite, sorted by country. If you cannot find the game you wish in this list, don't worry, TheLottoSite allow you to create new games very easily, as explained above!

AT - Lotto
AU - 6 from 38 Pools
AU - Lotto (mon,wed)
AU - Lotto (sat)
AU - OZ Lotto
AU - Powerball
BE - EuroMillions
BE - Lotto
BR - Dupla Sena
BR - Loto Fácil
BR - Mega Sena
BR - Quina
CA - Lotto 649
CA - Lotto Super 7
CH - Euro Millions
DE - Lotto
ES - Bonoloto
ES - El Gordo
ES - EuroMillones
ES - La Lotto 6/49
ES - La Primitiva
FR - EuroMillions
FR - Loto
IN - Fast Lotto
IN - Super Lotto
PT - EuroMilhões
PT - Loto2
PT - Totoloto
TR - On Numara
UK - DailyPlay
UK - EuroMillions
UK - Lotto
UK - Thunderball
US - MegaMillions
US - Powerball

Drawings

This page displays the results for some of the pre-defined lottery games. Initially only the last 10 drawings are displayed with emphasis on the last draw. You can, if you wish, show all the results by using the link at the bottom of the page.

The lottery drawings are used to calculate the game's statistics: all games for which there are drawings have also statistics available.

To see the drawings of one of the lotto games, you have to choose it from the list on the top of the page.

Statistics

This page shows several statistics for some of the pre-defined games. The analysis of these statistics is a very powerful tool that shall be used to choose the numbers of your Wheels. The type of analysis depends on each one feeling: choose the combinations that are more delayed? Choose the ones that occur more? The ones that occur less? etc.
After the analysis, we recommend the use of filters on your wheels. The filters can reflect the conclusions of your analysis.

To start, you have to choose a game, a component (if the game has more than one) and one statistic. For each statistic, you can get an explanation passing with mouse over the button .
The total number of drawings considered to calculate the statistics is also showed.

For each statistic, a table with the following columns is shown:

[Statistic name]	Shows the possible values of each statistic.
Occurrences	Shows how many times each value occurred in all drawings.
Expected Value	Shows what's the expected number of occurencies of each value relatively to the total number of drawings, considering that there was a perfect statistical distribution of numbers.
Deviation	What's the deviation of the number of occurrences relatively to the expected value? For a big number of drawings, the deviation should converge to 0.
Delay	Shows how many drawings the respective value doesn't happen.
Expected Value	Shows what's the expected delay of each value relatively to the total number of drawings, considering that there was a perfect statistical distribution of numbers.
Deviation	What's the deviation of the delay verified relatively to the expected delay? For a big number of drawings, the deviation should converge to 0.

Another very powerful functionality is the possibility of sorting the table by any column. To do that, you have to press the title of the column. Attention: when the number of rows of the table is very big, the sorting can take some time.
With this functionality, it's very easy and fast the find what value occurred more times, less times, the biggest delay, the biggest deviation, etc.
The current order is indicated by a small triangle at the left of the column used for sorting. You can get the reverse order by clicking the same title twice.

These are the available statistics:

Numbers	There are several combinations we can do with the numbers. If the name of this statistic does not have any number between brackets, it shows the occurrences of every individual number. If it has a (2), it shows the occurrences of all pairs drawn until now. (3) shows the triples, etc. Attention: to reduce the numbers of rows, if a certain number, pair, triple, etc. was not drawn yet, it will not be shown.
Even,Odd	Shows the occurrences of all possible combinations of the number of even and odd numbers per board.
Consecutives	Shows the occurrences of consecutive numbers per board. The number 0 means that there are no consecutive numbers, 2 means the maximum of 2 consecutive numbers, etc. Only the maximum counts; this means that if a board has 2 consecutive numbers and other 3 consecutive numbers, only counts as 3.
Max. Distance	Shows the occurrences of the maximum distance between consecutive numbers per board.
Range	Shows the occurrences of the subtraction between the biggest and the smaller number in each board.
Sum	Shows the occurrences of the sum of all numbers of each board.
Low,High	Shows the occurrences of all possible combinations of the number of low and high numbers per board. A number is low if is smaller or equal to half of the biggest number.
Terminations	Shows the occurrences of each possible termination for all the numbers of each board. The termination of a number is its last digit, ie, the termination of 29 is 9.
Max. Terminations	Shows the occurrences of the number of different terminations per board.
Max. Numbers per Termination	Shows the occurrences of the maximum of numbers with the same termination per board.
Decades	Shows the occurrences of each possible decade for all the numbers of each board.
Max. Decades	Shows the occurrences of the number of different decades per board.
Max. Numbers per Decade	Shows the occurrences of the maximum of numbers of the same decade per board.
Rows	Shows the occurrences of each possible row for all the numbers of each board.
Max. Rows	Shows the occurrences of the number of different rows per board.
Max. Numbers per Row	Shows the occurrences of the maximum of numbers of the same column per board.
Columns	Shows the occurrences of each possible column for all the numbers of each board.
Max. Columns	Shows the occurrences of the number of different columns per board.
Max. Numbers per Column	Shows the occurrences of the maximum of numbers of the same column per board.

Register

Registering is not mandatory but highly recommended because it has a lot of advantages:

• You can login to your account in any computer in the world!
• Your data is never lost. If you don't register, your data is lost when you delete your cookie.

Registering to TheLottoSite requires a valid email. AudaciaSoftware commits itself to never share your email address to anyone else.

Other information

Lotto resource library.
Site map.
TheLottoSite Blog, with news about the site.