Which Scratch Off Ticket Should I Buy

Just about everyone is familiar with the concept of the lottery, especially the big drawings that are held daily or every few days anyway. You select some numbers and hope to match them up to the ones that are drawn at random.

We’ve heard about the record-breaking jackpots and how office pools made an entire group of co-workers instant millionaires. Powerball and Mega Millions are the two biggies in the US and EuroMillions is Europe’s big millionaire making game.

Scratch-off tickets, though, have also created their share of nouveau riche. You don’t typically consider these instant win versions to be real contenders for providing big money, but you’d be surprised.

The Origin of Scratch-Off Tickets

Lottery draws have been a mainstay in the US since the 17th century and in other areas around the globe, well before that. In fact, lotteries were responsible for much of the original infrastructure in the new colonies and also helped to build the District of Columbia.

• Only play the scratch-off games at locations where there are still unclaimed prizes. 3) Never buy fewer than 10 tickets and always buy them from the same roll. That alone can increase your odds a lot.
• Every scratch-off aficionado has their own set of superstitions when it comes to where they purchase their cards, but it's best to go with a place that doesn't see a lot of action on the lotto so.
• How to win the lottery!!! In this video I scratch a whole book or roll of lotto scratch off tickets from the Missouri lottery, the whole purpose of this vid.
• She made headlines for winning an incredible amount on scratch-off tickets including a $10 million award in 2010 on a $50 ticket, making it her fourth million-plus prize from lottery scratchers. Now, a player like Ginther is not your typical customer as she’s investing big money.

$50 Scratch Tickets. Ticket Price: $50 Start: 1/18/2021. Ticket Price: $50 Start: 10/5/2020. Ticket Price: $50 Start: 8/17/2020. Texas Lottery » Games » Scratch Tickets » Scratch Tickets Home Page Games. Powerball® Mega Millions®.

Scratch tickets don’t have nearly as rich of a history as they’ve only been around since the 1970s. Maryland was the first state to introduce them, but the concept didn’t kick into high gear until the 1980s, and now you can find them everywhere draw tickets are sold which, in the United States, is in 44 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and the US Virgin Islands.

How Do They Work?

Scratch-offs or “scratchers” have some game play attached to them. Originally, you would have to do something basic like match up your number with the winning number or reveal three like prize amounts to be successful.

However, these days, the games are getting to be more and more intricate and involved, and it’s for a good reason. Lottery sales started to decline, but officials began to recognize that the longer the players were involved in the game, the more likely they were to buy more.

So, these days there are all kinds of extended play versions. For example, you could get a bingo scratcher and play through a full game of bingo scratching off each called number and then trying to match it to your number. Or there are crossword puzzles where you scratch off one letter at a time attempting to fill in actual words as each word equates to a prize payout.

It’s still a basic instant win premise as you’re not waiting for numbers to be drawn on a particular day, but it takes longer to get to the ticket result as you’re actively engaged in playing the game.

What Kind of Money Can You Win From Scratch-Offs?

You hear about someone winning $2, $5 or even $20 here and there, but there is big money potential in these types of tickets, but it all boils down to the actual game itself. There are dozens, and dozens of ever-changing game variations and every one has a different prize pool.

A $1 ticket may have a maximum prize of $500 or sometimes $5,000 with higher odds. One ticket may have a higher top prize and not as many lower level ones. Another game may offer a plethora of smaller prizes, so your odds of winning are much greater.

Whereas a lottery draw has a standard price like $1 or $2 per chance, scratch-offs offer multiple denominations. You’ll find $1, $2, $3, $5, $10, and even $50 or $100. You would think that those pricier versions would sit on the shelf, but you’d be amazed at how many people play those larger amounts. The odds of winning swings much higher in your favor at higher buy-ins and payouts can be $1 million or even more.

You won’t see these prizes reach the billion dollar mark as Powerball has before, but I wouldn’t turn up my nose to a few million.

A Winning Story

Speaking of those multi-million dollar wins, how about a $4 million dollar birthday present?

In 2014, a teen (yes, a teen) in Illinois scratched off a ticket given to her as a birthday present and ended up with a $4 million dollar gift. That $25 Target gift card I put in an envelope now pales in comparison.

The ticket’s grand prize was $100 million, so there is big-time money out there waiting to be revealed… literally.

A Winning Strategy

If I had a truly successful formula to winning big on lottery scratch offs, I would probably opt to keep it to myself but, there’s never a sure thing to gambling and especially when it comes to lotteries.

However, there are a few considerations that you may want to pay attention to if you’re heading out to buy some tickets.

The odds of winning are included on the back of every scratch off ticket, and you can also do some advance research online. The state lottery websites will provide you with all of the pertinent details about every game they offer.

You can pull up any game and take a look at the odds of winning. You’ll find some may have higher odds like a 5 to 1 but some tickets can even come in under 3 to 1. The other thing you’ll note when you access this information is the actual breakdown of the prize pool. You can see which games have more top awards and exactly how many prizes at each level are being offered.

Let’s take that a step further. If you are serious about bettering your odds, you can study the different games, and the lottery commission even updates the prizes that are claimed. So, you might see a $50,000 top prize game that had 20 of the $50,000 prizes available but 16 have already been issued, or you may note that a similar payout ticket has all 20 of those big winning tickets still out there in circulation.

You can truly give yourself at least a slightly better chance by doing your homework.

I, personally, can attest that I have better luck in winning on scratch offs when the game is brand new. I scour the titles until I see a recently released game and I do usually have better luck in at least winning something. A push is better than a loss any day.

Another thing to consider is that buying more consecutive tickets can give you a better chance to at least get some prize win. At 3 to 1 or 4 to 1 odds of winning, it does make sense to buy ten of the same ticket in a row rather than ten different one-offs. No, that isn’t a proven method either, but we’re talking about tipping the scales in your favor any way you can.

Not Convinced?

In case you’re skeptical about the really big payouts from a tiny scratch-off ticket, let’s take a quick look at Joan Ginther.

Are you not familiar with her name?

She made headlines for winning an incredible amount on scratch-off tickets including a $10 million award in 2010 on a $50 ticket, making it her fourth million-plus prize from lottery scratchers.

Now, a player like Ginther is not your typical customer as she’s investing big money. In fact, four wins prompted suspicion from the lottery commissions, so the legitimacy was investigated, but all of the payouts were found to be valid.

How did she do it? She bought a lot of tickets, maybe even a few million dollars worth. Her net payout wasn’t as great, but she certainly increased her odds by sheer volume.

Now, most of us don’t have a few million to throw around on scratchers but, it only takes one. Case and point, the Illinois teen who is now a millionaire courtesy of one relatively small birthday present.

Did you know more people in the world play scratch offs more than any other lottery games?

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

Where To Buy Scratch Tickets

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.

Buy Scratch Off Tickets

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.

Which Scratch Off Ticket Should I Buy On Amazon

If you have any other secret strategies or tips for everybody just leave a comment below and good luck!