Heads and Tails, Odds and Evens - The law of Averages

[Peter]

Hiya,

I've just become the manager of a syndicate at work having never placed more that a tenner on the lottery since it started and I thought I'd download all the numbers into a spreadsheet and have a play with some ideas I had to see if I could increase my chances of actually winning something meaningful.

The say if you flick a coin a 1000 times (unbiased coin that is), you can expect the actual outcome to be not far off 50%-50%.

I thought I'd do the same for Odds and Evens in the lottery and I was quite surprised to find that after 1599 draws and 9594 balls (no bonus), that the odd balls had over-achieved by only 14 balls, which, is pretty damn close to 50-50 (or 51.02-48.98 in this case as 1 extra odd) as you're gonna get.

Does anyone else employ this simplistic method to anything more complex and do you think The Law of Averages has any real meaning when it comes to prediction?

Best,
Pete