Start of an Obsession with Lottery Scratch-offs
The lottery is a fool’s errand. Everyone knows that, right? Still, every now and then I would buy a lottery scratcher ticket at the counter. There’s a joy in scratching off each section of the game, revealing the possible prize to meet the hope in your heart. Then of course the disappointment as it’s worth nothing at all, but at the cost of only a few dollars to spare. And if the prize turns out to be a a few dollars, then it was a few moments of free entertainment. That’s rare in our society.
Then one day I looked at the back and spotted a now about the odds, something like 1 in 4.16. How have you never noticed that before? One in every four scratchers is worth something?
I’m used to hearing the lottery odds of 1 in 60 million or whatever is announced in the daily news. But this is shockingly reachable. And of course that tidbit is tucked away on the mass of text on the backside, opposite where you really care to look, making it seem like the Virginia Lottery didn’t want you to spot that key detail.
This is where my journey started in finding the best lottery scratchers strategy, using real data to maximize returns and limit losses.
You know that probability of 25% is only for the smallest amount, the $1 you paid for the cheapest ticket. Then again, what if I knew the odds of each scratcher before I bought them. Before I pointed at one of dozens behind the counter I knew which was most likely to give me the best odds?
Get home and Google it – boom, the official Virginia Lottery website (valottery.com) comes up with a page dedicated to all the scratcher games. Even better, they post not just the odds of any prize. They also post the number of prizes still out there, the remaining scratchers unclaimed AND the number the Lottery issued to start with.
My mind raced with the possibilities with these numbers. I could easily calculate the probabilities of any prize, at any day of the week. If I had a list of games sorted by the best odds, I could walk into 7-11 armed with the knowledge to be an informed gambler, not just the average sucker.
Just a few hours’ work with a spreadsheet and I had it: a list of games sorted by the best odds of winning. And just like that, my love affair with the lottery scratchers was on.
Digging into Scratchers Data
I’m probably one of the “educated fools” among lottery enthusiast types. Or maybe I’m just “The Dreamer.” But can’t a man dream of finding an edge in the cracks somewhere?
Once I had a list, I wanted to add more features, more variables by which to rank them. Which games saw the biggest decreases in the number of prizes? What does it even mean when prizes are claimed faster than for other games? Even more importantly, when is it ever potentially profitable to buy scratchers? How many do you really need to win a profit? Is it possible to roll small winnings toward more scratchers and eventually hit a big win?
So the Google Sheet expanded, and expanded some more. Then I wanted to make sure I had daily numbers, so I built a way to scrape the data from valottery.com every day to update the statistics.
There’s more data I could dig out from these numbers. I could figure out strategies for weighing the returns, like the expected value, and factor that into a ranking. I could create rankings by not just the number of prizes remaining, but by the best probabilities, and then by the highest expected value. Then I could provide an average ranking.
I realized that if prizes are scattered throughout the rolls, but there were destined to be prizes within an ideal cluster size. Furthermore, I could show the maximum number of scratchers to buy for each scratcher game.
And then I thought: everyone should have this list. Everyone deserves a chance to have the best chances.
Why Virginia, you may ask? Well, because I live here. I wanted to know the odds of the games i saw in the counter of the 7-Eleven down the street from my house. Maybe in the future I’ll expand this site to help people in California, Florida, New York, or whereever.
I may have built this website for me, but you can use the data all you want. Have this list up on your phone when you next walk into 7-Eleven or Wawa or Sheetz or whatever convenience store. Tell the clerk, “this one, because I know it’s got the best odds. And yes, give me seven of them.”