James Hartley

Writes for Lucky Ticket Picks

About

I'm a maths teacher at a secondary school in Manchester. About two years ago the weekly lottery habit and the day job crossed over: I started pulling EuroMillions historical draw data from public databases to check whether the patterns people talk about actually survive basic frequency analysis. Counting draws properly is the sort of thing a maths teacher does almost reflexively, and the answer, once I'd done it, was mostly no.

What followed was noticing that several AI lottery platforms were packaging very similar analysis with better interfaces and subscription fees attached. The obvious question: do they produce different results from basic manual frequency analysis, or just look more convincing? I bought four of them and ran a proper parallel test. Six months, every draw, I logged each tool's picks and my own frequency-analysis selections side by side in a notebook I keep in my school desk drawer. My colleague Cillian (a PE teacher, cheerfully sceptical, reliably suggesting lucky dip whenever the methodology got complicated) glanced at the tracking sheet once and questioned the whole enterprise. He was not entirely wrong.

The results are in the individual reviews. One tool tracked above random selection across 30 draws in a way worth noting. Two were within noise. One came in below baseline. The test ran to its scheduled end regardless of how things looked at the halfway point.

Six months of parallel picks from a maths teacher in Didsbury, not from a statistician or probability researcher. I can tell you what the hit rates were. I cannot tell you what the next draw will be. Nobody can.

Articles by James Hartley

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