About Game Changes and Advantage Gold
Our Advantage Gold lottery software can use any group of drawings in the .SLH Smart Luck history file that you select. In most cases, our files have drawings from the beginning of the game, but many games have changed number format multiple times. In cases like these, we wait until a game has at least 50-60 drawings (enough to use medium term charts) in the new format, and then we will lock the game range in the file so that the default is to use only drawings with the current number format. This prevents older drawings from skewing the results in the charts that would have occurred because the lower numbers have been drawn many more times than the numbers that were recently added.
Powerball Changes
We recently locked the range in the Powerball file to start at the October 2015 drawing when Powerball first started its current number format, which confused some customers. But, we’d like to assure you that you can still use the older drawings in the Powerball file – just change the Range setting!
Game Range Setting in Advantage Gold
We’d like to call attention to the Range feature of Advantage Gold that you may or may not be familiar with. This option was also available in the old Advantage Plus, but it works a little differently in the new program.
The Game Range setting can be accessed by clicking the blue circle with a white R. This icon:
There are many options for finding and accessing the Range setting, using any of the following:
- The Range icon located on the top icon bar of the main screen of Advantage Gold
- The Range icon and Change Active Range link on the right-click menu from the main screen
- The Range icon and Change Active Range link under the Edit dropdown menu
- At the bottom of the screen which also shows the current draw number and date range that the program is using.
- CTRL+R will also access the Range feature
When you click the Range icon, this settings screen will open:
The Set Range window lists a chart for Structure Changes which shows you the drawing range, date range, and numbers used, for each format change the game went through. For Powerball, there were changes 7 different times from its start in 1992. As you can see in the example above, the original 5/45+1/45 game is much different from the current 5/69+1/26 format. We have started at draw 2449
If you want to change the range, you can do any of the following:
- Click the checkbox to use a fixed range of however many drawings.
- Change the starting (and/or ending) draw to any starting date.
- Click a range in the Structure Changes chart to use that draw range.
- To use the whole range, change starting draw to 1.
You can switch the Range from the bottom of any chart as well, which can be helpful if you want to use fewer drawings for short term charts, or compare past Smart Picks to see how they performed against the past winning numbers. Don’t forget, you can also use the – and + key to move the range back and forward by one drawing at a time!