Casinos openly welcome people who are stimulated by chance events. If you believe in astute gambling, let alone intelligent investing, you will not walk through the doors of a casino. They are a profit-making business, not a charity. A ‘house edge’ is built into their machines, and the odds are that you will walk away with a little less money in your pocket. Slot machines have a ‘house edge’ between 1% and 15%. On a roulette wheel, that ‘edge’ is just over 5%. They will make about $5000 profit from every $100,000 that is bet.

Prediction with the roulette wheel is near-impossible, even though James Bond always seemed to score huge wins. Too many bettors are swayed by the gambler’s fallacy, in which they believe that past results affect future consequences. Just because the roulette wheel has scored 5 Reds in a row does not mean that the next roll is more likely to be a Black.

One math savant claimed that tiny imperfections in the roulette wheel could increase his ability to predict the correct number. If the wheel develops a slight imbalance, it can create a form of ‘drop zone’ in which the ball is more likely to fall. However, if the table is perfectly balanced (and the vast majority are), then a win is pure chance, and only outright luck will lead to a profit for you. Because of the accumulation of the ‘house edge’, you will lose more the longer you play.

Casinos often lack clocks or windows, which makes it harder to stay aware of time passing. Some also provide free drinks, which means that your judgment will be impaired. In a casino, there is no such thing as a lucky number that will get better results. When you are drunk, you tend to think otherwise.

You do not have to be drunk to be fascinated by numbers. The connections between numerology and luck have resonated with people all through history. It is based upon the mystical connection between a number and some coinciding events. 3 and 7 are considered as lucky numbers in most cultures, although Chinese people prefer not to use 7. Thirteen is unlucky in most cultures, and Friday the 13th reputedly indicates bad luck. In China and Japan, 8 is considered lucky because their pronunciation of the word sounds similar to prosper.

Four is another unlucky number in China, and citizens avoid having it in their address if they can. However, 4 is a good luck symbol in most of the Western world, because a four-leaf clover is considered to be fortuitous. There is no scientific validity to any of these beliefs, but if you are determined enough, you will believe that your lucky numbers might lead to an amazing fortune.

Lotto winners somewhere have probably claimed that they were guided to the winning numbers through divine intervention, a vivid dream, or some numerological system. A Lotto win is due to chance as much as anything else. Most people will have a story ready to tell if they win. Those winners are then ready to immediately share the narrative about their system for choosing numbers, and so the mystique about number selection grows with each telling. Some Lotto players choose numbers based upon the previous luckiest numbers that were drawn, although the numbers featuring in each new draw will have the same chance of coming up as any other numbers.

It is possible to improve your chances of selecting six Lotto winning numbers. Buying a Systems entry with nine numbers instead of six on each entry lowers your chances of a Division One win to 1 in 96,965, which is over 80 times a better chance of winning than choosing six numbers only. A System 20 entry gives you the very worthwhile odds of 1 in 210, although it will cost you $32,064.

20% of all Lotto wins around the world are achieved by syndicates. These help you to invest in the higher Systems entries. Just buying lots of tickets obviously improves your odds. There might be some merit in choosing numbers above 31, given that many people choose their family’s birth dates. If your ticket then wins, it will possibly be shared with fewer people.

On rare occasions, some people have worked out mathematical loopholes with Lotto systems. In the early 2000s, a well-known couple in Michigan eventually won over $38 million with their mathematical system. If no one won, the game called Windfall would roll down each week until it capped out at $5 million. If that amount was not won, it was then allocated to a few lower winners who had most of the winning numbers. The husband, Jerry, calculated that if you purchased enough tickets, you were a guaranteed winner. Their final play cost them $712,000 which purchased 366,000 tickets. It took them four days at 12 hours every day to feed the tickets into a machine. The loophole has since been closed.