• How To Pick Winning Lotto Scratchers
• How To Win The Lottery Scratchers
• How To Win Lotto Jackpot
• Secret To Winning Scratchers
• Best Winning Scratchers In California

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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?

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.

When people ask “What are the Best Lottery Scratch off Odds?”, they usually are referring to the overall game odds. These are the printed odds on the back of instant scratch games. You might see something like “Overall Odds of Winning are 1 in 4.05”.

These are the the odds of winning any prize, including prizes that are equal to the price of the ticket.

How To Pick Winning Lotto Scratchers

One of our most popular scratcher strategies is our ranking of the best Overall Odds (available free to all our members) where players can instantly compare the overall odds for each game.

However, we are here to caution you that overall odds may not be the same as the best odds of winning. How so?

State lotteries can manipulate the overall odds to make them appear among the best when in reality, the individual prize odds might be among the worst.

Let’s dive in and see an example firsthand.

How is Overall Odds Calculated?

We need to take a step back and first see how does a state lottery calculate the overall odds of winning.

For every scratch game, the state lottery will determine the prize levels (e.g. $5, $10, $100, etc.) and the total number of prizes that will be made available. For our example, I’ve pulled an actual prize chart from a state lottery website.

As we can see, there are 12 different prize levels with a total of 2,395,512 prizes available. The lottery already tells us the overall odds of winning this game are 1 in 4.12, as show below.

The lottery calculated the “1 in 4.12” overall odds by dividing the total number of tickets printed by the total number of prizes available (2,395,512).

But we don’t know how many tickets were printed.

That’s right. The number of tickets printed isn’t disclosed, BUT we can figure it out by multiplying our total number of prizes (2,395,512) by the overall odds (4.12).

The result is approximately 9,900,000 tickets printed. Note we rounded the ticket count as it’s a rough estimate but close enough.

How about Prize Odds?

Now that we have the overall odds calculation out of the way, let’s dive a little deeper and see how the odds of each prize is calculated.

In our same game example, we see that the $500 prize will have 1,247 prizes available at the start of the game. Remember, the lottery has determined they are going to print 9,900,000 tickets so among all those tickets, there will 1,247 $500 winners.

To calculate the odds for our $500 prize, we simply divide the 9,900,000 printed tickets by the 1,247 prizes and learn the odds of winning the $500 prize are 1 in 7,915.

Pretty easy, right? Here’s what all the original prize odds look like.

Now that we know how the lottery calculates the odds, why shouldn’t we use the overall odds to figure out the best scratch off odds? Can’t we just see which game has the best overall odds and play that one?

Unfortunately not. Keep reading and let me show you a couple reasons why you shouldn’t rely only on the overall odds.

Is Winning Really Winning?

First, most players would agree that just getting their money back on a scratch ticket isn’t actually winning. “Winning” the price of the ticket back gives the illusion of winning and keep players coming back but it’s really just breaking even.

Let’s take a look at our same example from above and recalculate the odds of winning a prize more than the ticket price. You know, actually “winning”.

In this example, we want to know what are the real odds of winning any prize GREATER than $5, the price of our example ticket.

To do that, we’ll sum up the total number of prizes again but this time exclude all those breakeven $5 prizes.

With the $5 prizes removed, we now see there are really 1,407,930 actual winning prizes.

Using our math skills from above, we find that the actual winning odds, or as we call them Adjusted Odds, is really 1 in 7.01 tickets is a winner. That is 9,900,000 tickets divided by 1,407,930 total prizes.

The overall odds just change by OVER 70%!

Now some players may not care as getting their money back is winning in their mind. But let’s dive just a little deeper.

The Best Odds Illusion

How To Win The Lottery Scratchers

I’ve just shown you that all those breakeven prizes aren’t really winning prizes but are there to make the overall odds seem better. Let’s go a step further and say a lottery wanted to really manipulate a scratch game to look better than it really is.

Below is our original prize table from the example above, but I made 2 simple changes. I lowered the $250,000 top prize from 5 prizes down to just 1 and I lowered the second top prize, $10,000, from 24 prizes down to 2.

The change looks simple enough, the total prize count change is barely, if at all noticeable. The total number of prizes only went down by 26 prizes. However, let’s check out our prize odds.

We now see a HUGE change as the top prize odds went from 1 in 1,973,902 to now 1 in 9,869,509. A whopping 5x increase in odds!

The same thing for the $10,000 second place prize. We altered the count down to 2 prizes, which changed the odds from 1 in 411,230 to 1 in 4,934,755. This was a 12x increase in odds!

But here is the very sneaky part. Did you notice the overall odds?

How To Win Lotto Jackpot

The 1 in 4.12 overall odds never changed.

In both cases the lottery has two tickets with the same overall odds. If you had a choice though, which one would you choose?

For the curious, where did that extra prize money go? Remember, we took away 4 prizes of $250,000 and another 22 prizes of $10,000. You guessed it, pure lottery profit.

See, in our first example the total prize pool at the start of the game was $34,077,430, which represented an overall payout to players of 69.06%.

However, in our revised numbers, the prize pool dropped $1,230,000 to a total prize pool of $32,847,430, which is now only a payout of 66.58%.

The overall odds stayed the same but the lottery is keeping an extra $1,230,000 in profit instead of paying it to players.

Bringing it All Together

Let me show you one last example that brings both our points together. Let’s start with our original prize table again.

Now I’m going to reduce those top 2 prizes again like above BUT I’m also going to add some $5 prizes back. Let’s add 100,000 of the $5 prizes.

The lottery is still keeping a nice bonus profit by removing most of the top prizes but did shift a small piece of that money back to $5 prizes.

Here’s what our new prize table looks like

After taking out the top prizes and adding 100,000 small $5 prizes, we have a total prize count of 2,495,486. And now the magic.

Secret To Winning Scratchers

Let’s divide the same ticket count by the new prize count. For those keeping track, that is 9,900,000 tickets divided by 2,495,486 total prizes. Our new overall odds of winning are 1 in 3.95!

Just like that I gave you a ticket with the best odds of winning, yet I took away most of the top prizes AND I’ve kept a bunch of extra ticket sales as pure profit!

Conclusion

Relying solely on the overall odds of scratchers as a way to determine the best odds of winning is a recipe for disaster.

Best Winning Scratchers In California

The real “best odds of winning” will vary by the player and their own strategy.

Make sure to get a FREE account here at Lotto Edge. We offer lots of free tools to help you find the games with the best odds of winning for the strategies and prizes you want.