Which scratch-off is worth buying today
State lotteries publish how many prizes are left in every scratch-off game, every day. That means a game's odds on the shelf are not the odds printed on the back — and some games are still being sold after every top prize is gone.
Pick your state
Coming: Pennsylvania.
Measured, not repeated
Two figures on this site were counted rather than looked up, because nobody publishes them:
The number nobody else shows you
Every app in this category ranks games by expected return. None of them tells you that the games at the top of that ranking are almost always the ones you can trust least.
Here is why. A game that is 97% sold has very few tickets left, and nobody — not us, not the state — publishes exactly how many. The estimate can be off by half. A game that is 40% sold has millions left and the same estimate is accurate to within a percent. Sort by return alone and the noisy games float to the top, because noise is what produces extreme values.
So we publish the margin of error next to every figure, and separate the games we can rank honestly from the ones we cannot.
How it works
“1 in 4.2” on the back of a ticket means four tickets were printed for every prize. Multiply prizes printed by those odds and you have the print run. Subtract what has been claimed and you have an estimate of what is left, which gives you today's odds rather than launch day's.
Annuity prizes are discounted to what a winner actually collects. A game advertising “$10,000,000 CASH” may pay $500,000 a year for twenty years, which is not ten million dollars today, and counting it as such inflates the return on exactly the games people are drawn to.
What this is not
Expected value on a scratch-off is essentially always below $1 returned per $1 spent — typically between 60 and 80 cents. No amount of analysis changes that, and anyone telling you otherwise is selling something. What this can do is stop you buying the 70-cent game when the 80-cent one is on the same rack.