Lotto 6/49 is a lottery game that you pick 6 numbers out of 49 numbers. There are 13,983,816 possible combination. You have higher chance to be hit by lightening than win the top prize of  lottery as it is one in million to be hit by lightening strike. To improve the success rate, we will have to do some calculation.

Odd and Even Numbers

If we use odd and even number to separate the possible combination. We get following result

6 odd numbers and 0 even number: 177,100 (1.27%)

5 odd numbers and 1 even number: 1,275,120 (9.12%)

4 odd numbers and 2 even numbers: 3,491,400 (24.97%)

3 odd numbers and 3 even numbers: 4,655,200 (33.29%)

2 odd numbers and 4 even numbers: 3,187,800 (22.8%)

1 odd number and 5 even numbers: 1,062,600 (7.6%)

0 odd number and 6 even numbers: 134,596 (0.96%)

As we can see above, combination of 4 odds numbers and 2 even numbers, 3 odd numbers and 3 even numbers and 2 odd numbers and 4 even numbers are the majority of combination (Around 81.06%)

As result, we can safely guess, the winning number has around 80% of chance fall into this category.

Let’s take look a real life example, from Canada Lotto 6/49 past winning result since 1982/06/12 to 2023/12/23

6 odd numbers and 0 even number: 45 (1.08%)

5 odd numbers and 1 even number: 409 (9.82%)

4 odd numbers and 2 even numbers: 1,039 (24.94%)

3 odd numbers and 3 even numbers: 1,376 (33.03%)

2 odd numbers and 4 even numbers: 948 (22.76%)

1 odd number and 5 even numbers: 316 (7.59%)

0 odd number and 6 even numbers: 33 (0.79%)

From above, it clearly shows around 80% of winning numbers falls into our expected combination range.

Consecutive Numbers

Another way to filter out the low ratio number is the consecutive number. 

6 consecutive numbers: 44 (0.0003146%)

5 consecutive numbers: 1,892 (0.0135299%)

4 consecutive numbers: 41,624 (0.2976584%)

3 consecutive numbers: 623,414 (4.4581107%)

2 consecutive numbers: 6,257,790 (44.7502313%)

0 consecutive numbers: 7,059,052 (50.4801551%)

From above you can see it is very low chance to see six consecutive numbers to be draw. Most of the draw should fall into no consecutive number or two consecutive number. Let’s look the real life example, Canada Lotto 6/49 past winning result since 1982/06/12 to 2023/12/23

6 consecutive numbers: 0 (0%)

5 consecutive numbers: 1 (0.0240038%)

4 consecutive numbers: 10 (0.2640422%)

3 consecutive numbers: 135 (3.2405185%)

2 consecutive numbers: 1,856 (44.5511281%)

0 consecutive numbers: 2,164 (51.944311%)