While the expensive cards are better, buying in bulk is still a good idea because it increases your chances of winning. A lot of people swear by purchasing scratch cards in bulk. Consider purchasing a few scratch cards from the same game in a single trip to the shop, rather than just buying one scratch card. Scratch-Off prizes expire one year from the game's end-sale date posted at palottery.com. Winners should immediately sign the back of their ticket and call the Lottery at 1-800-692-7481.
A Mesquite woman bought a Texas Lottery $20 Instant Millionaire scratch-off ticket that was worth $1 million. She cashed in the ticket and claimed the prize. Here's a look at what she's doing. The opportunity to make a fortune off of a small, one-time wager is incredibly tempting, but why leave it all up to chance? Learn how to pick the scratch off cards with the best probability of paying out, and know what odds you are paying for. Let your scratch off lottery ticket experience be an investment, and not a gamble.
Secrets of State Lottery Scratch-off Contracts
When most people think of advantage gambling, state lottery scratch-offs are the last thing that enters their minds.
Everyone's heard of counting cards at blackjack. There are even several moviesabout it.
And poker has been shown to be a game of skill; just look at the repeat winners of major tournaments like the World Series of Poker and the World Poker Tour.
But most people still refer to the lottery as an 'idiot tax'.
And scratch offs have a notoriously bad expected value (which you can think of as a gambling game's return on investment).
To give you an example of how bad lottery tickets can be, most $1 scratch offs have an expected value of around 60%, meaning for every $1 you spend, you're expected to get back just $0.60; a $0.40 loss.
Most penny slots have paybacks that are better than that.
And other gambling games, like blackjack, can approach 99% payback without any card counting at all.
I'm here to shed light on a new way of thinking about scratch-offs and show you how you can improve your odds. It won't always be profitable.
But under the right circumstances, it can be. If you're going to play regardless, you might as well maximize your chances of winning.
Here are my insights about how to win at scratch-offs. I've gained these insights by reading the contracts and procurement documents that state lottery organizations have with their ticket printers.
Combine these insights with sites that calculate a scratch-off ticket's odds, and you'll be playing like a sharp
Where Are Scratch-off Grand Prizes?
Grand prizes are not random.
I'm sure all of these insights will come as a surprise.
But this one is probably the biggest.
Surely the state wants to ensure a fair game.
How can it be fair if the biggest prizes of all aren't even random?
Are $20 Scratch Offs Worth It
Here's an image of the procurement document that the Massachusett's lottery used to elicit bids from ticket printers:
You'll see that they require the grand prizes to be distributed evenly throughout the game.
Note that 'distributed evenly throughout the game' is not random.
If the prizes were random, then they might all appear at the start of the game. Or they might all appear at the end of a game.
But the state doesn't want that to happen. If all of the grand prizes were claimed at the start of the game, then people would stop playing the game because they would have no shot at the big money.
You can take advantage of this fact by figuring out how many tickets are in a 'pool' where a grand prize should be. If there are 9,000,000 tickets and 3 grand prizes, then divide 9,000,000 by 3 to figure out that there must be 1 grand prize every 3,000,000 tickets.
Then, use the state's lottery website to figure out how many tickets remain. Most states publish this information for each game.
In the example game just mentioned, if there were 7,000,000 tickets remaining and still 3 remaining grand prizes, then you know the first grand prize must be in the next 1,000,000 tickets. Your odds just improved from 1 in 3,000,000 to 1 in 1,000,000.
That may not seem like much, but it can mean the difference between negative and positive expected value.
Is There A Limit To The Number Of Big Winning Tickets In A Roll?
Here's an image from documents filed as part of a Texas lawsuit against the state and the ticket printer:
In this contract that Texas has with IGT, there's a clause that states that there can be no more than a certain number of $25-$50 winners per pack of tickets. There's another clause that states there can be no more than one winner of $75 and higher per pack. (The 'one' is redacted, but we can deduce that tit's one by looking at the word following the redaction, which is 'winner' rather than 'winners').
How can you use this to your advantage?
Buy only one ticket from a pack at a time and scratch it right there at the store.
If it happens to be a big winner, don't buy any more tickets from that pack.
What Is The Minimum Payback for a Roll of Scratch-off Tickets?
This next image is from the request for a proposal from the New Mexico lottery association to ticket printers:
It shows that each pack of tickets has some guaranteed payout. The details of the guaranteed payout aren't specified, but from other contracts and personal experience, I've found it to typically be about 50% of the price of a pack of tickets. If an entire roll of tickets costs $600, then the GLEP is usually about $300.
What this means for the advantage player is that you should not stop buying after a string of losers.
But this one is probably the biggest.
Surely the state wants to ensure a fair game.
How can it be fair if the biggest prizes of all aren't even random?
Are $20 Scratch Offs Worth It
Here's an image of the procurement document that the Massachusett's lottery used to elicit bids from ticket printers:
You'll see that they require the grand prizes to be distributed evenly throughout the game.
Note that 'distributed evenly throughout the game' is not random.
If the prizes were random, then they might all appear at the start of the game. Or they might all appear at the end of a game.
But the state doesn't want that to happen. If all of the grand prizes were claimed at the start of the game, then people would stop playing the game because they would have no shot at the big money.
You can take advantage of this fact by figuring out how many tickets are in a 'pool' where a grand prize should be. If there are 9,000,000 tickets and 3 grand prizes, then divide 9,000,000 by 3 to figure out that there must be 1 grand prize every 3,000,000 tickets.
Then, use the state's lottery website to figure out how many tickets remain. Most states publish this information for each game.
In the example game just mentioned, if there were 7,000,000 tickets remaining and still 3 remaining grand prizes, then you know the first grand prize must be in the next 1,000,000 tickets. Your odds just improved from 1 in 3,000,000 to 1 in 1,000,000.
That may not seem like much, but it can mean the difference between negative and positive expected value.
Is There A Limit To The Number Of Big Winning Tickets In A Roll?
Here's an image from documents filed as part of a Texas lawsuit against the state and the ticket printer:
In this contract that Texas has with IGT, there's a clause that states that there can be no more than a certain number of $25-$50 winners per pack of tickets. There's another clause that states there can be no more than one winner of $75 and higher per pack. (The 'one' is redacted, but we can deduce that tit's one by looking at the word following the redaction, which is 'winner' rather than 'winners').
How can you use this to your advantage?
Buy only one ticket from a pack at a time and scratch it right there at the store.
If it happens to be a big winner, don't buy any more tickets from that pack.
What Is The Minimum Payback for a Roll of Scratch-off Tickets?
This next image is from the request for a proposal from the New Mexico lottery association to ticket printers:
It shows that each pack of tickets has some guaranteed payout. The details of the guaranteed payout aren't specified, but from other contracts and personal experience, I've found it to typically be about 50% of the price of a pack of tickets. If an entire roll of tickets costs $600, then the GLEP is usually about $300.
What this means for the advantage player is that you should not stop buying after a string of losers.
Since each roll of tickets is guaranteed to have a certain minimum payout, then every loser you see increases the chance that the remaining tickets are winners.
Conclusion
While none of the above insights will guarantee you will win, they are just a few of the things you can do for yourself if you want to know how to beat scratch-offs.
Combine these insights with some expected value calculations from the remaining prizes that get displayed on the state lottery websites and you'll be doing way better than the average lotto player.
Good luck.
About the Author
Eric Ihli, a professional gambler/programmer, spent 10 years as a full-time professional gambler and 5 years as a software engineer. He now combines those two passions by writing software to discover and evaluate profitable gambling opportunities.
More of a visual learner? Watch my YouTube video as I go through the data collection and analysis!
Scratch-off lottery tickets are one of the most widely available forms of gambling that you can take part in. These tickets are usually in the price range of about $1 to $30, and allow you to win prizes that range anywhere from a free chance at another lottery ticket, to jackpots in the tens of millions of dollars.
But what is the true value of a lottery ticket? The state lotteries have to be making a profit, but how large of a profit are they actually making? Are tickets worth 99% of the price you pay for them? 85%? What about 50%? Considering the amount of people that play these scratch off lottery games, it's kind of surprising how this information is not common knowledge.
In this article, we'll be going over how to calculate the expected value of a lottery ticket, and finding out how large of a return we should expect to see from our purchase.
First of all, we're going to need some data. In order to calculate the true value of a lottery ticket, we will need each prize, along with the odds of winning that prize. Fortunately for us, many state lotteries provide these detailed odds on their websites. Today we'll be looking at the value of scratch offs from the California State Lottery.
The PDF below gives us all of the ongoing games and possible prizes to win, which is all that we need in order to calculate the expected value of a ticket. This chart shows the possible prizes and odds of a $30 game called $10,000,000 Bankroll, which we will be using as our example.
The way that we can calculate the true value of this ticket is by finding the value of each individual prize, and then adding all of those values up.
To find the value of the possibility of winning an individual prize, we can use the following formula:
Let's first calculate how much the chance to win $10,000,000 is worth. We have a 1 in 3,000,000 chance at winning $10,000,000, so $10,000,000 * (1 / 3,000,000) = $3.33. This means that the chance of winning $10,000,000 from this ticket is worth $3.33 on its own.
When we use this formula for all 12 possible prizes we could win from this ticket and add them all up, we get a total value of $23.96. However, this ticket costs $30 to buy, which means that on average, you will only get about 78.9% of your money back. Compared to other methods of gambling, this is an awful return, considering that games such as blackjack and roulette are upwards of 95%.
But, let's not look at just one ticket, let's look at all 57 scratch off lottery games that are currently being advertised. First of all, let's look at the expected return of the ticket, grouped by the ticket's price:
We can see that as the price of the ticket increases, the % return increases as well. The return is as low as 59.7% for a $1 ticket, and reaches as high as 80.5% return for a $30 ticket.
So does this mean that we should be buying the more expensive tickets, since they have a higher expected return? Absolutely not. With the more expensive tickets, we are losing a lower percentage of the amount we paid, but we are wagering a larger amount, leading us to a higher total expected loss. The chart below shows the expected loss in dollars grouped by the price of the ticket:
We are only expected to lose about $0.40 when buying a $1 ticket, and we are expected to lose nearly $6 when buying a $30 ticket.
The last metric that we will calculate is the overall probability of winning a prize from a ticket. We can do this by simply adding up all of the odds from our table. For example, if we had a 20% chance at winning $5 and a 10% chance at winning $15, we would have a 30% chance at winning either of those two prizes (20% + 10% = 30%).
After adding up all of the probabilities from the $10,000,000 Bankroll game that we were looking at, the overall probability of winning a prize seems to be 35.9%, which means that you have just over a 1 in 3 chance of winning a prize when buying this ticket.
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Let's take a look at the probability of a winning ticket, grouped by the price of the ticket:
We can see that the more expensive tickets have a higher chance at being a winning ticket, while the cheaper tickets have a worse chance. A $1 ticket has a 22% chance of winning any prize, while a $30 ticket has a 36% chance of winning any prize.
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Are Scratch Offs Worth It
You will almost never see a scratch off lottery ticket with a positive expected return, but I have seen one occasion where this has happened. If you want to learn more, check out my video on the story of Cash Winfall on YouTube.
Hopefully this article allows you to make more informed choices while gambling on scratch off lottery tickets, and if you'd like to take a look at the odds of winning prizes for any given ticket, you can go to CaLottery's Website and scroll down and click on 'See Odds for all Prize Levels for all Active Scratchers Games'.
If you enjoyed this article, feel free to check out some of the other analyses that have been written on MindingTheData.com, or follow us on Instagram @MindingTheData. Thanks for reading 🙂
