One of the most asked questions regarding online lottery draws are whether or not these games can be won by using certain lottery strategies. Are the games completely random? Who has the better chances of winning: A person who closes his or her eyes and picks out numbers by randomly pointing at a number set, or a person who uses mathematical skills and probability techniques to determine a number combination?

There is no single definitive address to this question. What is sure is that winning an online lottery, especially the jackpot price, is a rare possibility. This is because there are a lot of people who join the lotteries and there are a lot of possible number combination that can be won. For instance, there is only a one in around 175,711,536 chances that a particular person would win the current Mega Millions Jackpot.

So, does it make sense to use lotto strategies to come up with a combination? If yes, which of the many methods is the most effective?

Different people use different techniques when choosing their number combinations. There are those who use the numbers that suddenly come to mind when they purchase their tickets, and there are those who let the random number generator - usually offered with each online lottery draw - to pick their numbers for them. These two methods are clearly different but they share on common characteristic: They are both random.

Other people shy away from such random ways of choosing a number combination. These people usually prefer using lottery strategies, which includes finding “strong” numbers at the very least.
 
One of the oldest and most popular online lottery strategies know to generations of lotto players is what is known as the “Hot and Cold” Number strategy. The idea behind this method is that there are “hot numbers” (those that were drawn in recent draws), and there are “cold numbers” (those that have not been recently selected). To use this strategy, it is important that you have the winning numbers for at least the past six months.

This strategy has advantages and disadvantages. On the positive end, you can utilize this strategy to determine what numbers are regularly drawn for a certain online lottery game. By reviewing past results, you will notice that some numbers do show up more than others do.  You can use these numbers in your entry and hope that they would come up in the next draw. However, there is a big risk to doing this. It is possible that the hot numbers have already used up their popularity and would not be drawn again for some time. So, you can also choose some of the cold numbers since there is a chance that they would be the next ones to appear.