What Are The Best Lottery Scratchers To Buy?

It's THE most important decision you can make. If you choose the wrong ones, you seriously hurt your chances of winning. Here's how to find the best scratch off tickets to play.

It's NOT:-

• the newest one
• the shiniest one
• or the one the retailer wants to sell you!

It's also not "3 of these, 2 of those, er, one of the crossword ones, and er, how much do I have left..?" (Are you guilty of this? When you only went in to buy a loaf of bread..?)

You can throw money away on scratchers. OR you can buy the ones that are most likely to have you walk away with a life changing sum.

Which would you prefer? ;-)

OK, So What Are The Best Scratchers To Buy?

You need to know 2 things:-

[1] Only play the games with 'big enough' prizes.

What is 'big enough'..? That's up to YOU - because enough to be life changing varies from person to person. For most people this means you should never play the cheapest tickets. Ever.

Why? Because you have to win again, and again, and again to reach that position of a life changing win. Your odds of winning over and over are far worse than just aiming for the right prize in the first place!

[2] Which scratch off tickets have the best odds?

Ticket Price	Best Odds?
Scratchers Best Odds
$1-$2	No
$5	Better
$10-$20	Best (see below)
$30-50	Best (see below)

There's more to this though - it's not just the best overall odds OR even about the best jackpot odds.

What you really need to know is which ticket is best TODAY.

That's because the odds change all the time as tickets are sold, and prizes are won.

And there's more to figuring this out than you might think. There's even a nice formula we can use. (But there's also, potentially, a massive shortcut, which I'll get to in just a moment!)

You may have already heard the tip to 'only play games with lots of big prizes remaining'?

It's a decent tip. (i.e. don't be that person blindly playing a game where all the big prizes have already gone - this happens a lot!)

But you can do a lot better than this!

Most lottery companies in the US give out some fairly detailed data on scratchers. It's right there on their websites. Sometimes hidden away, but it is there.

What we can do with this data is figure out at any given time which are the best scratchers to buy today. Not by the odds when those games started. But by the odds TODAY. Based on how many tickets have been sold. And how many prizes have been won. Both big AND small prizes.

That's a big deal, because this 'ratio' approach tells you which games have most winning tickets left OVERALL. It tells you which games have a higher percentage of winners versus losers.

So you simply avoid the games with the worst win ratios, and only play the ones with the best win ratios. The result - you will buy more winning tickets.

It takes a little extra effort, but it's worth it.

How To Work Out For Yourself
Which Are The Best Scratchers To Buy

If you like messing around in spreadsheets, you can calculate this stuff for yourself. (But that super easy shortcut is below if this sounds like hard work..! Note: it's only currently available to those in the USA though, sorry.)

Firstly you need to find where they keep all the scratchers data. Head for your lottery companies official website, and start digging. You may find a nice table, but more likely you will need to dig in to the details of each ticket available one at a time.

What you want to do is make up a spreadsheet of all this data. That is, the ticket name, price, number of top prizes, top prizes remaining, number of other prizes and other prizes remaining.

You might also want to store the date the ticket went on sale, and how much the major prize amount is too.

The formula you then want to apply is basically this:-

(top prizes remaining / number of top prizes)
  divided by
(other prizes remaining / number of other prizes)

This 'ratio' gives you a useful figure to compare games. The higher that number is the better.

It is vital however to keep updating this data regularly. Every week is fine. But leaving it a month can turn the best scratch ticket into one of the worst.

What's The Super Easy Shortcut?

The easy way to do this is to just get Dave's reports. He runs a service that does all this number crunching for you. And it's a ridiculously cheap $20 for a whole year. For that you get a fresh up to date report every week specially for your own state.

Even if you only buy 1 scratcher a week it's a no-brainer at that crazy cheap price (just don't tell Dave I said that!)

This option is currently only available to players in the USA though. If you're not in the US, all is not lost, you'll just have to put in a little manual effort and DIY it - here's how.