This site is shutting down soon. I don't have the time to maintain it or provide support, and it's costing too much money each month to run the servers. I have a friend who is considering taking over. If you want to see the site maintained, you can try talking them into it. Email support@scratchoff-odds.com and I'll forward them your message.
If you're looking for an alternative to this site, a web search will provide a few options on the first page of results. If you prefer this site over the alternatives, I'd be interested in hearing why so I can know what I did right.
If you're a data scientist and want a historical database of scratchoff data as reported by state websites, send me a link to some of the work you've done - your Github or whatever. You might be able to find some interesting anomalys and perhaps even discover possible fraud or exploitable patterns. (If you do, I want a cut.)
It's been fun. Good luck out there!
You're here because you want to win more.
I'm here to show you how.
It is a mathematical fact that some scratch offs are better than others.
I will prove it.
Card counters get banned from casinos for using the exact same math.
If you want to know how this math works, it's simple. Keep reading.
If you just want to know which scratchoff ticket has the best odds:
Did you know that states publish the number of remaining grand prizes for each game? They do this as a transparency measure so that the public can feel assured the games are fair.
Don't believe me?
Here are the remaining prizes for Texas' "Million Dollar Loteria".
Take note: some scratchoff games are still being sold even though no grand prizes remain.
That is a good start, but we can do better. All it takes is a little math on some big numbers.
You don't need to understand the math to improve your odds. I'll share it anyway so you can check my math for yourself.
But remember, you don't need to understand the math. If you just want to know you're not getting ripped off by the state, simply:
For those of you still reading, let's jump into how this works.
Imagine a very simple scratchoff game.
There are 10 tickets and only 1 is a winner.
Your chance of winning is only 1 in 10 (or 10%).
If you bought every ticket, you would lose $1 nine times and you would win $5 one time.
That is typically a bad game for you.
But, you don't have to buy every ticket!
Let's imagine that the state sells 1 ticket every day to some other random lottery player - someone not as smart as you, someone not using this system.
And, every day, the state will update their website with the number of tickets sold and the number of prizes remaining.
You can sit back and wait for 6 days.
Now, after 6 days have passed and 6 tickets have been sold, you can check and see if the grand prize of $5 has been claimed.
If it has already been claimed, don't play.
If the grand prize is still out there, now there's only 4 tickets remaining and one of them is worth $5.
You could buy every ticket and be guaranteed to win!On this website, that is what the "score" (🏆) of the scratchoff represents. When a score breaks 100, that means that you could buy every remaining ticket and be guaranteed to win.
The numbers for a real lottery game are much bigger than the example above, of course.
There aren't just two prizes, $0 or $5. Instead, there may be dozens or more prizes ranging from $0 to $5,000,000.
Also, there may be over 10,000,000 tickets printed, including hundreds of thousands of losing tickets, dozens of grand prizes, and everything in between.
These numbers are way too large to do the math on pen and paper, but we have computers that read the updates from each state every day and automatically crunch the numbers to determing the best scratcher.
Play smart and good luck!