And you thought winning the lotto was pure dumb luck? While that’s true for the scratch-off games, says Gail Howard, the author of Lottery Mastery Guide (Smart Luck Publishing, $24.50), a lottery isn’t entirely random, she insists. Howard, a former stockbroker, began charting winning numbers in the 1980s and claims they form predictable patterns. Certain combinations —all evens or odds; consecutive numbers, like 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 — come up infrequently, she says. So what to try? With pick — 6 tickets, the most popular form of lotto, choose numbers that add up to a figure between 115 and 185. (Seventy-one percent of all winning combinations fall in that range, says Howard.) “People often play patterns that end in the same number, like 17, 27, 37; or personal numbers, like birthdays,” says Larry Lesser, an associate professor of mathematics at the University of Texas at El Paso. “If you choose that way, you’ll probably share your winnings if you win.”