The lottery game results above are a disaster. As you can see, the game had 5 winners, all sharing a $1m jackpot.

It's not uncommon for players to share prizes... it happens all the time in the secondary prize positions. 

But to have the main prize in your grasp, then discover that it is only $200k must have been a real disappointment for these players.

The problem is what I call the Birthdate Principle.

When players who don't use my System try to pick their numbers, they are usually lost. They have no idea what to do, so they use real-world examples.

And guess what they select - after their personal lucky numbers, their license plate, and so on...

They use days:

• The date of their granddaughter's birthday.

• Their own Birthday.

• Their dog's age.

• The date they first met their partner.

You get the story. All these numbers are less than 31, the days in a month.

Look at the numbers for the weekend's lotto. No more than 31. And it happens more often than not.

Whenever the largest number limit is 31, that the jackpot gets shared by a larger number of players. 

So, while a birthday number is a disaster, buying tickets on your birthday is not.

Dimitrios Hatzisotiriou with New York Lottery official Yolanda Vega.

A former pizza maker from Greece treated himself to a birthday scratch-off ticket gift, and got the best present ever.

Dimitrios Hatzisotiriou treated himself to some scratch-off tickets on his 73rd birthday while he was waiting, ironically, for the bank to open.

“I was on my way to the bank to pay some bills, but it was closed,” Hatzisotiriou said. “I went to my friend’s liquor store a few storefronts down and played some tickets while I waited for the bank to open.”

Little did he know, he was a few scratch-offs away from becoming a millionaire. What a birthday present!