It is widely used by individual players and syndicates to secure wins provided they hit some of the drawn numbers.
[1] Lottery wheeling systems allow players to play as many numbers as they wish in a well-organized and balanced way.
Similarly, a wheeling system guarantees a P-win if it contains every possible combination of P of the player's numbers that are drawn.
A lottery wheel acts as a single ticket in terms of a particular guarantee, but it allows playing with a set of numbers of size larger than the size of the set of numbers drawn in the lottery.
In this lottery, a wheeling system with 10 numbers and a guarantee of 4 if 4 would require at least 20 tickets to be played.
Difficulty in constructing wheeling systems greatly increases with more numbers and combinations.
Because of this steadier stream of wins, some lottery players find wheels an attractive strategy.
Regular small wins while waiting for a jackpot seems to be a sought-after option for syndicates.
These are often based on mathematically incorrect assumptions and claims, like the gambler's fallacy, or on plain misunderstanding or misrepresentation of probability theory.
Many lotteries provide the option of playing a full wheel either on a regular type of ticket or on a specially designed one without the need to fill all of the combinations individually.
Several European lottery corporations have gone a step further and have provided the option of playing abbreviated wheels from a pre-approved selection, by using specially designed playing slips which refer to the chosen system by number and do not require filling the individual combinations of the system.
The drawback is cost—full wheels become fairly expensive as the size of the set of the player's chosen numbers increases.
In a famous occurrence, a Polish-Irish businessman named Stefan Klincewicz bought up 80% of the 1,947,792 combinations available at the Irish Lottery.
Checking the table confirms the wheel's basic guarantee (a 4-win if four of the 10 player’s numbers are drawn).
The goal of filtering a full set is to eliminate combinations that the player does not want to play.