All registered users of NetLotto have now been emailed with instructions on how to get their free upgrade to Version 2.3. This upgrade adds full support for all 7 ball lotteries, such as Canadian Super 7, and allows you to put in your own past results history for any game. In addition, entering the winning draw for any game will now automatically add it to the past results history for that game. Naturally, updated past results will continue to be available weekly from the NetLotto Web Site. Currently, we maintain past results for 38 different games, but now you can extend that to any game you like.

A lucky player in Boise, Idaho purchased a winning Powerball ticket worth $220.3 million and 1,837,163 additional players won prizes totalling more than $15.1 Million. The winning ticket was sold at Jacksons Food Store, which is the same store that sold an $87 million winning ticket about 10 years ago. Lottery offices were closed on Monday in observance of Memorial Day and the winner has not come forward. We haven't heard if the winner was a NetLotto user or not, but we DO have a number of customers in Idaho, so who knows? Powerball is one of the most popular games supported by NetLotto.

Now that the Powerball jackpot has been won, Mega Millions is now the biggest jackpot game in America! With millions of people playing (more than any other multi-state, mega-jackpot game in the U.S.), jackpots can roll to even higher levels at a faster rate. Second prize is $175,000. You choose six numbers and there are nine exciting ways to win in the game. Each play costs just $1.00. You can play Mega Millions in Georgia, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Texas, Virginia and Washington.

From Tattersalls in Australia comes the story of a man with a broken leg who used his time in hospital to play combinations of the numbers on his identification tag. He won over $1 million!

The next time someone tells you that you've got a better chance of being struck and killed by lightning than of winning the lottery, confound them with some real facts: Last year, 2,304 people in North America each won more than $1 million in the various lotteries, and a further 7,176 won over $100,000. By contrast, only 97 people were killed by lightning.

In 1989, South Dakota pioneered the first state Video Lottery in the nation. Many lotteries worldwide have patterned their Video Lottery systems after the South Dakota model. The legislation to authorize Video Lottery was introduced into the Senate in 1988, but fell one vote short of the required two thirds majority. It was reintroduced a year later and passed. In 1992, Video Lottery appeared on the general election ballot as an initiated measure for repeal. South Dakotans voted by 63% to 37% to keep Video Lottery. Shortly after the election, a lawsuit was filed challenging the constitutionality of Video Lottery. Eventually, in 1994, the state Supreme Court declared Video Lottery unconstitutional and a court order to shut it down was handed down on the 12th of August that year. In a special legislative session, the state's lawmakers passed a resolution to place a constitutional amendment on the general election ballot to reauthorize Video Lottery. Subsequently, South Dakotans voted by 53% to 47% in favor and Video Lottery was restarted on 22nd of November, 1994. On the 7th of November, 2000, voters again defeated a measure to outlaw the Video Lottery, this time by a margin of 54% to 46%. Interestingly, in 1986, North Dakota became the first state to vote against starting up a state lottery.

Many people believe that they can give themselves an edge in the lottery by playing numbers that they somehow have an intuition for. And who's to say they're wrong? After all, the literature is full of examples of folk who've dreamed the winning numbers, who've seen them in a vision or, in the case of our earlier story, on their hospital identification tag! On the other hand, the statisticians tell us there's only one way of increasing your odds, and that's by putting in more entries. If you put in 100 entries, then you improve your odds by a factor of 100. For various reasons, the agency-generated "random" entries and the "system" and "wheeling" entries are not a good idea. But for most people, generating and then checking 100 entries is just too much hard work and runs the risk of actually missing a winning entry. That's where NetLotto comes in. You seed the number generator for your preferred game using your own intuition, select how many entries you want to generate and then let NetLotto do all the hard work, including checking the winning draw against your entries.

KEEP YOUR GAMES HISTORY UP TO DATE: If you're a NetLotto package owner, you'll want to keep your games history up to date. To get the latest results, click on the link download past results and follow the instructions. This is a totally FREE service.

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We would love to hear what you think of this issue of Lottery Tips. And of course, if you have any suggestions for upcoming issues that you'd like to share with us, please send those, too! Just e-mail me at help@netlotto.org