What Are Dummy Numbers

Using dummy numbers you can work with tickets with lower count of numbers than specified by lottery rules. Dummy numbers are outside the range specified by lottery rules. Example: lottery drawing 6 numbers out of 49 will have dummy numbers 94 to 99, keno lotteries will have dummy numbers 90 to 99, powerball lotteries drawing 7 numbers out of 35 will have dummy numbers 93 to 99 ( Expert Lotto demo lotteries). These numbers mask ticket number positions. The lowest dummy number (94 in this example) masks the first ticket number position, dummy number 95 masks the second position etc. It means that some ticket numbers are outside the range specified by lottery rules. With some limitations you can work with these tickets as if they were regular lottery tickets.

Some filters and statistics may ignore dummy numbers or even the whole ticket if it contains dummy number(s), e.g. Odd/Even filter. However the remaining regular ticket numbers do affect the filter conditions or statistics counters if the application logic allows it (e.g. ticket match filters).

You can put a dummy number into any ticket number position. However masking all ticket number positions with dummy numbers is not allowed (e.g. when using the ticket Generator). To do so you must the Swap Numbers function (see below).
By masking ticket positions you can work with tickets composed of only two, three or four regular numbers. You can enter dummy numbers in ticket's edit fields or in the Swap Numbers, Generator and Masked Numbers functions. Then you can replace dummy numbers with regular drawn numbers using the Swap Numbers function.

It is not possible to use dummy numbers for bonus number positions when playing a powerball lottery (a bonus number drawn from a separate pool of numbers may match a main ticket number, e.g. demo lottery Expert Lotto Powerball or Euro Millions) . 

Example 1 - Dummy numbers in the Ticket Generator [Expert Lotto 6/49]

We chose to create all combinations of three numbers from the range of 1 to 15. There are 455 combinations possible. Dummy numbers were chosen for positions 4,5 and 6. The Generator automatically chose dummy number 99 for position 6, dummy number 98 for position 5 and dummy number 97 for position 4.

You can use these steps to find out which combinations of three, four or five numbers were not drawn in the lottery history so far. First you must create reduced-size tickets for all combinations using the whole range of drawn numbers. Then use the Match Winning Numbers filter to compare created combinations with winning numbers history.

This procedure is very suitable to verify the coverage of your bet. In the steps above we used all triplets from 15 numbers. We can create a reduced set of random tickets from the same 15 numbers with maximum allowed match in 3 numbers and compare them with the full set of triplets using the Match File filter with the Tag matching tickets option switched on. See also Example 1.

Example 2 - Dummy numbers in the Swap Numbers window [Expert Lotto 6/49]

Let's generate the following tickets into the package.

In this example we want to replace certain ticket numbers with dummy numbers. We do not want to mask the same ticket number position in all tickets. We will use the Swap Numbers function to replace number 11 with dummy number 94 and number 21 with dummy number 97. Note the first two tickets in the figure above. After swapping the numbers the package will look like follows:

Number 94 now occurs in all tickets originally containing number 11 and number 97 occurs in tickets originally containing number 21. Because dummy number 94 always takes the first ticket number position, the rest of ticket numbers is moved to other positions and resorted. The same applies for dummy number 97 that always takes the fourth ticket number position.

You can use this function for example to evaluate how many triplets are covered by your bet excluding any triplet containing number 11 and/or number 21.

In the following example we generated random tickets from 15 numbers with maximum allowed match in 3 numbers. Then we manually added ticket 1,2,3,4,5,6 using the edit fields and the Add button. Then we used the Swap Numbers function: 1=94, 2=95, 3=96, 4=97, 5=98, 6=99. The result is in the figure below:

This way you can mask all ticket number positions (see the last ticket in the figure above). The first number position is always masked by dummy number 94, the last number position is always masked by dummy number 99 etc. In the figure above the count of dummy numbers ranges from 'no masked positions' to all ticket number positions being masked with dummy numbers, which is a combination the Generator does not allow.

Note: The dummy numbers can be used even in files exported in CSV format.