A long time ago, I worked for a retailer who sold lottery tickets. In order to sell tickets, I had to attend a government training session, at the actual government lottery center, which educated me on the different games and how they worked. It was probably the most interesting thing about the retail job.
The people doing the training were the ones that either designed or managed the games and payouts. Some were near the end of the their career and were happy to share the history of the games and the ups and downs of managing them.
I distinctly remember a couple tidbits where even my teenage mind went "well that's pretty relevant information to someone looking to game the lottery".
1. There was one game where the gov't actually decided to end the lottery because nobody ever won. The number of digits, the total possibilities and the number of people who actually bought tickets meant nobody ever won. So the gov't shut it down, but then players complained that they loved the game so much, so they started it back up. Still nobody won.
2. Scratch off tickets were sold in foil sealed packets of 20 tickets. The trainer dropped that there was always one winning ticket per pack, and only one. I had assumed that winning tickets were randomly distributed - some packets might have none, some might have 2 or 3. Nope, just one per packet. Now as the person selling the tickets, that's kind of important. I never mustered the energy to actually pursue it, but you could imagine how that could drastically increase your odds of a winning ticket.