James Hartley
Writes for Lucky Ticket Picks
About
I'm a maths teacher in Manchester. I've played EuroMillions most Fridays for a few years. At some point the two facts overlapped: I started pulling public lottery draw data to check whether the patterns people talk about survive basic frequency analysis. Mostly they don't. What surprised me was how much money people charge to present that same null result with a confident interface.
I bought four AI lottery platforms over about six months and ran parallel tests: my own picks from basic frequency analysis, alongside each tool's suggestions, logged every Friday in a notebook in my school desk drawer. My Year 11 students occasionally spot me updating it during break. I've described it as "probability research." They seem appropriately sceptical.
One platform tracked above random selection over 30 draws in a way that was interesting. Two were within noise. One came in slightly below baseline. Those numbers are in the reviews. The test didn't stop early when results looked good or extend when they didn't.
I'm a maths teacher, not a statistician or a professional gambler. I won't tell you any of this will make you money. EuroMillions has a negative expected value and that doesn't change because a dashboard has a heat map. What I can give you is six months of parallel tracking with numbers that weren't cherry-picked.
Articles by James Hartley
- How to Calculate EuroMillions Number Probability Using Historical Data
- Is Lottery AI Real or Just Better Math? Five Common Questions Answered
- Why Hot and Cold Numbers Are Often Misunderstood by Players
- Setting Up Your First AI Lottery Strategy with LottoChamp
- LottoChamp vs Lottery Defeated: Which Algorithm Wins My Notebook Test?
- Calculating the Real Odds of a EuroMillions Lucky Star
- Lotto Master Key Review: Does it Pass the Math Teacher Test?
- How I Filter Lottery Defeated Picks Using Manchester Math Principles
- Three Common Lottery Patterns That Are Mathematically Meaningless
- A Teacher’s Guide to Using Lotto Master Key for UK Draws
- How to Build Your Own EuroMillions Frequency Chart
- Why I Traded My Spreadsheet for LottoChamp: A Maths Teacher’s 6-Month Experiment
- The Teacher’s Notebook: 6 Months of Testing AI Against the EuroMillions (2026 Update)
- 12 Weeks, 3 AI Tools, and a Very Patient Math Teacher: My Honest Lottery Experiment (Updated for 2026)
- The Algebra of Luck: A Manchester Maths Teacher’s 26-Week Experiment with LottoChamp
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