Tackling the 6/49 Lottery and Debunking Common Myths with Probabilistic Methods and Combinatorial Designs

At the end, the house always wins! This simple truth holds for all public games of chance. Nevertheless, since lotteries have existed, people have tried everything to give luck a helping hand. This article compares objective scientific approaches to tackle the 6/49 lottery: probabilistic methods and combinatorial designs. The mathematical models developed herein can be modified and applied to other lotteries. The newly constructed (49, 6, 5) covering design is introduced, which meets the Sch\"onheim bound. For lottery designs and for covering designs, a benchmark based on probabilistic methods is presented. It is demonstrated that common attempts to outwit the odds correspond to limitations of numbers to subsets, which disproportionately reduce the chances of winning.