I'd picked up my prize money from the lotto store. Four winning tickets had come to $72 and I got a couple of bonus tickets too.

It was a small win, and mainly forgettable. I normally do much better.

But there's one thing about those wins I won't forget. And that is the winning pattern of all the tickets I had bought for the game.

When I put the tickets through the machine, the winning tickets were the first 2 and the last 2 tickets in my pile of coupons.

Very neat, I thought. Maybe I should only play tickets in the first half of my selection.

Maybe that starting pattern could mean a larger number of wins are waiting for me further in the pack.

When that pattern was revealed a while back, my 22 prizes were clumped together in the first half of the ticket selections. 

But if I believed that this was a regular recurring pattern - and then tried to play only the first half of my ticket group to save money - I would have missed out on the last two tail-end wins today.

If you look for winning patterns like the one I used and try to replicate them, you’ll lose.

That’s because the lottery is quite random. There is no guarantee that the tickets will be all at one end of the ticket selection or the other.

So there is a danger in anticipating winning patterns.

Here are some more articles about winning patterns you should know about:

• The hidden patterns in lotteries revealed that few players know about

• The bizarre lotto number pattern that gave 6 winners only half a million each