In 1983, American lottery author Gail Howard discovered some 10,000 tickets with the number combination 1-2-3-4-5-6 were bought each draw in the New York Lotto game. She commented that this ticket was doomed to lose because the selection was too far out of balance to ever come up in a random drawing.

To convince her readers not to select this, or other unlikely combinations, but to play the combinations that are more likely to be drawn as winners, she invented the Balanced Game.

She added up each of the six winning number combinations all the way back to the beginning of the first New York 6/40 Lotto game in 1978. Gail found that the majority of sums ranged roughly between 100 and 140. She calculated the range of sums for various Lotto games and published the Balanced Game method in several national magazines, newspapers and books.

Her intention was to show her readers that to have a better chance of winning, the sums of six favourite Lotto numbers should fall within a certain range of sums similar to the sums of actual drawing results.

Mathematically, the draw machine never prefers certain balls over others. Therefore any number and hence any combination of lottery numbers is equally likely to be selected. In fact, statistically speaking, just because a combination won last week does not mean the exact same combination cannot win next week. Its chances of being drawn again are exactly the same as the chances for any other combination you may choose.

The question is, has the exact same combination has ever won twice in a row in any lottery in any country? The answer is no. If it has not happened so far, and although there is no reason why it should not happen - experience teaches us that it is highly unlikely.