What Lottery Tickets Have the Best Odds?

The lottery tickets with the best odds are the ones that have the smallest jackpots OR the highest ticket prices.

But that does NOT mean you should choose to play those games.

Let’s get into what you should do instead.

The odds are just one of the factors you should take into account when deciding what is the best lottery ticket to buy.

Here’s why.

Games such as Pick 3, or the $1 scratch off tickets have very good odds of winning the jackpot. The problem is that those ‘jackpots’ are actually very small. Typically only around $500 for Pick 3, and maybe as much as $5,000 for a $1 scratch game.

That’s simply ‘not a big enough win’ for most people.

Sure it’s nice to win that much, and for some people that would be life changing – but if it isn’t big enough to be life changing for you then it’s the wrong game choice.

You might be saying ‘well I just need to keep winning it often enough to make a nice income…’ but please don’t fall into this trap. Nobody really makes an income out of Pick 3 (sure, people can be ‘in profit’ for a short while with these small jackpot games, but they soon fall behind again!).

So what should you do?

Do look at the odds of winning lottery games, BUT also look at the jackpot and think about what that means to you personally. Then you can figure out which lottery has the best odds of winning the right size of jackpot for you.

To do this properly you also need to think carefully about the ticket price (because a $2 ticket price effectively means you need to double those odds versus a game that only costs $1). This can be tricky, but I created a tool to compare lottery games here that takes all this into account and tells you which game has the best odds overall.

Deciding which lottery tickets to buy is one of the most important decisions you can make. It’s also something that most people completely overlook and end up buying whatever appeals at the time. Which really hurts their chances of actually winning.