How To Buy Winning Scratchers
Did you know more people in the world play scratch offs more than any other lottery games?
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Is it because they are easier to win? Or maybe it’s because you instantly know if you won or not?
I’d say it’s because the fact you can buy it anytime, anywhere for literally nothing, a lot of them to go as high as $20-30 but most of them cost anywhere from $1-5.
Before we move on..
Did you know, how scratch cards are manufactured?
It’s a taught choice so let me start from the beginning, follow the steps below to pick your winning scratch card.
1. Check the odds and the winners
There are literally thousands of scratch cards you can choose from so how do you pick the best one?
It’s pretty simple, just compare the odds of winning and the number of guaranteed winners. How do you do that?
Just go on your national lottery website or the scratch card’s website and simply go through all the scratch cards and find the one with the biggest oods of winning such as 1:2.5 or 1:3.
You’re most likely gonna end up with more than one card with this kind of odds so to pick your winner buy the card that has the most winner cards left.
This is a screen shot from the UK National Lottery’s website. As you can see it show you the game, the grand price, the price and the number of top prices left.
You can find this sort of information for any scratch offs you want to play, as long as they are legit.
To find out more about a specific scratch card all you have to do is click the on the card you want and it will take you to a page where you can find everything you need to know about it. Such as this one:
As you can see UK’s “£1 Million Green” game has 1:3.70 odds of winning a price. This means statistically speaking that for every 4 tickets you buy, you are guaranteed to have at least 1 winner.
Your job is to find a game that gives you the best odds of winning and to find a game that has the most top prices left to win, this will usually indicate that this game was played by fewer players and there are more prizes left overall.
This takes me to my next point, how do you increase your chances even more?
2. Buy in bulk
Look at it this way, if you have a 1:3 chance of winning $10, if you buy 3 tickets you increase your odds to 3:3 so you’re guaranteed to win the $10. So if you were to buy let’s say 30 tickets(which is how much tickets there is usually in a whole stack) you instantly boost your odds to 30:3 which means in your 30 tickets there must be 10 winners.
Of course, you can have more or less winning tickets and the prizes will be different. The way the scratch cards are manufactured isn’t as simple as printing a winner every second card. You can have 10 winning tickets in a row but you can also have 10 losing tickets in a row.
Not that it happens often, but it does happen and when it does happen that you lose 6-7+ tickets in a row go back to the store and buy more of the same scratch card.
I remember it happened to me only once that I had so many losing tickets. I bought 12 scratch offs for £1 each with odds 1:3 and I lost 11 and won only 1 ticket worth £2. I went straight back to the store and bought 15 tickets this time. What do you think happened?
I had 10 winners and 5 losers, those 10 winners equaled to £84, that’s a £57 profit.
It’s my little secret strategy I use if you lose a lot of tickets in a row go back to the store and purchase another stack of tickets.
I don’t know maybe it’s just luck but eevery timeit happend to me I ended up making a decent profit this way. That example above was just the first time it happend to me so I remember exactly how it went.
This works the other way around as well. If you had significantly more winning tickets than loses don’t go back to the store to buy more tickets because you’re more likely gonna end up with more losing tickets this time.
How many tickets should you buy?
It’s totally up to you and your budget. When I first started I’d just buy anywhere from 10-20 tickets. Right now as I gained more knowledge and experience I buy anywhere from 20-50 tickets at a time, depending on how many there are in store.
3. Stick with the same game and store
If you found the game you want to play stick with it, don’t play any other games. You can alternatively pick two or three games that give you the best odds to play, as long as you stick with them and keep track of the remaining winning tickets.
If the remaining winning tickets on one game go low you can play the other one you pick that has more winning tickets left and so on.
This may sound stupid but also what I like to do is to stick with the same store you buy your lottery tickets from. Why? I’m not exactly sure why or if this increases your odds in any way but it’s what I do and it has worked well for me.
This way I can easily keep track of the scratch cards I want to play, the amount of losing or winning tickets in this store etc. In the beginning, I would just go around my neighborhood and visit all the stores that sold scratch offs and I would buy 20-30 tickets from each and I’d just go back to the store I won the most money from.
I’d make some sort of relationship with the store owner or the person that’s always behind the counter and I’d ask them if there were any winners or losers today for the game I play. This way I can judge if I should buy a stack of tickets or if I should let it go to this day. So far it worked well for me.
This year starting on the 1st of January I already made roughly around £3000 profit from scratch cards alone. This includes a £2000 winning ticket.
If you have any other secret strategies or tips for everybody just leave a comment below and good luck!
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.
California Lottery Scratchers Winning Form
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
Ca Lottery Winning Scratchers Left
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.