I know what you are thinking – there is no strategy for playing lottery games. It’s true, these are totally luck-based single-outcome wagers with a fixed set of odds. It is not true, however, that strategy can’t be applied to lotto gaming, even when you’re talking about scratch-offs.
Call them scratchers, scratch-offs, or just plain old “lottery tickets”, you’re talking about the same game. The idea for inexpensive, randomized, pre-printed card games is as old as gambling. The use of computers to randomize and control the games (and to increase game variety and entertainment) is relatively new. Instant lotto games have only been around since the mid-1970s, and the instant scratch-cards didn’t hit the market until 1987.
I’m a player myself – I have a minor poker habit and I regularly place sports bets at different times of the year. I manage my gambling budget very tightly, with unit sizes for different forms of gambling. It may surprise you to hear that a person like that, who does a ton of research and maintains strict control over their budget, invests $100 a week in instant-win scratch-off lotto tickets.
You may scoff at the game, and you probably did scoff at the word “invest” in the above paragraph, but I do consider it an investment, like the rest of my gambling budget. It also has a ton of entertainment value for me. So here’s the way I look at the game – I have fun playing them, they’re easy to find at any corner store or grocer’s, and I’ve won a few decent jackpots along the way to keep me hooked.
Scratch-Off Odds & Specs
Depending on where you buy and play your scratchers, the details below will vary a little bit. I live in Texas, which has its own state lottery system that produces a huge variety of games at a lot of different prices, and with varying odds.
The good news for players is that most states in America (and, apparently, most instant-win game operators in the rest of the world) are required by law to give you information about the odds right there on the card. This information is also easy to find online.
My current favorite scratch-off is 100X the Cash, put out by the Texas Lottery. The reason I’m playing it as often as I do: the top fifty prizes haven’t been claimed yet. More on that as part of my strategy later.
I bring it up because right there on the ticket, the state lotto commission has printed both the overall odds and the odds of winning the top prize of $2.5 million. For this game, overall odds (including break-even prizes) are 1 in 3.3. Buy four cards and you’ll no doubt win at least a break-even prize, which for this ticket is $20.
By the way, the odds of winning that huge multi- million dollar prize are just a hair above 1 in 2 million. Believe it or not, that’s the same odds of a person dying from falling out of bed. It sounds like a longshot, and it is – but the ticket (and other scratch-cards) offers a variety of prizes, most of which have much shorter odds.
When I play 100X the Cash, I’m mostly playing for one of the 3,000 or so $500 prizes still unclaimed. A single win of $500 gives me a $100 monthly lotto profit on a single card. Maybe now you’re beginning to see the earliest stages of a legitimate gambling strategy.
My Own Experience Playing Scratch-Off Games
I am not going to lie and tell you that I break even every week or even every month. I’ve had about as much success with scratchers as I’ve had with sports betting, losing about $1 for every $4 I’ve invested. Do the math and you’ll see that I often lose about $100 a month chasing scratcher jackpots.
But what’s kept me in the game is the use of gambling strategy to optimize my chances of winning and to keep the games fun and on-budget. The fact is, the tickets I buy have average odds of 1 in 3 or so, about the same as a column bet in roulette. Compared to some available games of chance and skill, that’s pretty good.
I’ve personally won as much as $10,000 in a single scratch – on my first time buying the popular Bonus Weekly Grand Texas Lottery scratcher, no less. I win enough $100, $250, and $500 prizes to keep the budget in the black throughout the rest of the year. So here’s how I do it.
I use money management tactics
This part of my overall scratch-off strategy is right at the top because I think it’s the most important single piece of the whole puzzle. If you ignore everything else in my lotto tactics guide, remember the stuff I’m about to say about managing your money. This is also the simplest part of my strategy to teach and to apply, so let’s start with a discussion on how I manage my lotto bankroll.
Bet sizes on scratch cards are based on what sizes are available for sale in your area. Spending no more than $100 a week on my native Texas scratch-offs gives me a lot of options. The state sells cards in $1, $2, $5, $10, $20, and $50 denominations, so I can technically play between two 100 per week, based on which games I pick and my $100 bankroll.
In my situation, tickets at the $5, $20, and $50 level are currently the most valuable (more on that below), so I buy one $50 ticket, two $20 tickets, and two $5 tickets. That’s five outcomes per week, or 260 a year. That means each of my games costs an average of $18.46. Thankfully, the “break-even” odds on the more-expensive games are relatively-low, so I find that when I buy the pricier games I break even more often I outright lose.
Here’s the thing – I never spend more than $100. I never spend less, either; or, at least, I haven’t had to yet. Scratchers have been good enough to me that I’ve never lost more than a couple hundred bucks in a given year.
The fun that I get out of the games makes that expenditure more than worth it. And who knows, one day I may win a million-dollar level prize and end up owning some beautiful island somewhere, never to write another sentence about gambling again.
I handicap all the available games
It may be a little silly to use the word “handicapping” to describe the kind of research I do before I pick a scratch-off game to play, but I like using betting jargon when I can, and actually it is a form of handicapping if you don’t mind loosening your definitions a little bit.
Essentially, this part of my scratch-off strategy involves looking at a number of features about the scratch-off tickets available to me and deciding which ones are a good value. The categories aren’t complicated – I compare what prizes have already been claimed, what prizes remain, what my overall likelihood of winning is, and how much the game fits into my money management strategy.
Weighing all of these factors against one another is how I handicap and pick what I believe are the best (read: most likely to earn me a decent jackpot) currently available in my market.
I gave a good example of a game I handicapped above – 100X the Cash (released in January of 2015) is a $20 card, which gives me pause (I try to stick to as many $5 tickets as I can). But the fact that the game’s largest prizes are still available still overwhelms any squeamishness I have about the investment. Also, I can buy two (or even a few more) of these and still stick to my weekly budget.
Some games look attractive but turn out to be bad buys with just a little handicapping. A great current example for me is the Texas Lotto game Weekly Grand. Promising a top prize of $1,000 a week for 20 years, the game is very popular among native scratch-off fanatics. It also has a large number of $10 and $20 prizes, something I look for in a $2 ticket.
The trouble is, every single top prize has been claimed (at the time of this review), and the biggest prize left is a handful of $300 rewards. Yes, that’s a great return on a $2 investment, but it isn’t worth the space in my gambling budget anymore.
Remember, all it takes is a prize in the hundreds to keep most people’s lotto budget at a break-even point, and all it takes is a prize in the thousands to push a player way into the black. That 10k windfall was particularly nice, if you think of that as more than two years’ lotto play (by my strict bankroll rules) from a single outcome.
I don’t chase losses, and I don’t overspend
Consider this an extension of the money management strategy from above. If you don’t yet know that chasing losses is a great way to go bankrupt, then you’ve heard it here. If I buy $100 worth of tickets, and I end up losing all but $80 of it, I do not go back into the store to try to win back the $20 I just donated to the State of Texas general education fund. Once my budget is burned up, I leave it that way.
The other side of that coin is important, too – I only buy $100 worth of tickets, no matter how much I win. Many a week, I make a profit of $100 or $200 on a single prize, and like anyone I’m tempted to buy “just a few more” $5 or $20 tickets, to improve on my streak – which isn’t really a streak at all, of course. I quit after $100 even when I win.
I’d like to think that I’ll quit playing the games when I win my first million-dollar level prize, but I’m not sure that’s true. I don’t play slot machines, and I think the scratch-off aspect of the cards satisfies that part of the gambler in me.
Played with strategy, as outlined above, I’ve found scratch-off cards to be an important part of my overall gambling budget. These games are probably the most common gambles on the planet, they’re relatively low-risk, and they make me happy. Provided you stick to my budget and follow my other rules, you can have fun playing scratchers, and maybe consider that play an investment just like I do.