Who wouldn’t want to know how to win scratch offs, right?

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We all want to win the lottery!

Scratch off cards can be pretty frustrating. You think that you’re onto a winner and then you see the card is a loser.

So is there any way to increase your odds of winning scratch offs?

You’ll be glad to know that there are definitely things you can do to win.

These are pretty simple things too! So whether you are a gamble often or just buy scratch offs or lottery tickets to hopefully hit the jackpot or win the Powerball, once in a while, you can use these tips.

In this post, I’ll give you a few tips to increase your odds of winning on every scratch off ticket you buy.

Tips to Increase Your Chances of Winning Scratch Cards

Here are a few not so “secrets” you can use to win money on your next lottery scratch card.

1. Don’t purchase the cheapest scratchers

There are so many scratch cards out there nowadays that it can be pretty confusing to know which ones to buy. You sort of feel overwhelmed by all of the choices!

There are so many different designs, prices, prizes and brands available that it can be hard to decide which ones to purchase.

Thankfully, there’s a really easy tip you can use to make sure you purchase the right ones:

Don’t buy the cheapest scratch cards.

It can be tempting to purchase the most affordable ones; after all, you can get more of them for your money.

But these cards are cheap for a reason – the prize pool is lower.

You’d be better off purchasing just a few of the more expensive cards, rather than lots of the cheap ones. It’s quality over quantity basically.

2. Buy them in bulk

While the expensive cards are better, buying in bulk is still a good idea because it increases your chances of winning.

A lot of people swear by purchasing scratch cards in bulk. Consider purchasing a few scratch cards from the same game in a single trip to the shop, rather than just buying one scratch card.

Your odds of winning may increase if you purchase in bulk. It’s like with the lottery; the more entries you have, the more chances you have to win.

If you get a bunch of scratch cards in one purchase, then the chance of hitting one of those winning scratch cards may be higher.

This is a pretty easy way to up your chances of winning, so you may want to consider it. Don’t just buy any card in bulk though. Follow the rest of the tips in our article and combine those with buying in bulk to maximize your winnings.

I’d only recommend purchasing in bulk if your budget allows it – talking of which…

3. Make sure you set yourself a budget

I cannot recommend anything more highly when it comes to playing scratch cards than setting a budget.

It’s so important for your financial health.

Just as important as actually setting the budget though, is sticking with it. Be strict with your budget.

While this doesn’t increase your chances of winning, it does keep you from losing too much money.

Set yourself a weekly or monthly budget and make sure that you stick with it.

4. Check the odds before you buy

Like I said before, the amount of scratch cards out there nowadays is crazy. There are so many to choose from.

So how do you know which ones have the best odds?

As I also said earlier, purchasing the more expensive cards is a good option.

But another simple tip is to purchase the cards with the best odds, because, well, these give you the best chance of winning!

It’s not tough to find them either.

The odds are actually printed on the back of every ticket!

Really. You can even ask the cashier at the store to tell you what the odds are on the back of the tickets before you buy them. Choose the games that have better odds, and you’ll increase your chances of winning.

5. Check your state’s website

The last thing you’d want to do is purchase a ton of cards for a game only to learn that the biggest prizes have already been claimed.

It’s completely legal to sell tickets for a scratch off game after all the top prizes have already been claimed.

That’s why I’d highly recommend checking to see if a game has had any prizes claimed before you make a purchase.

Some stores will post a flyer with the information, although sometimes this is weeks out of date.

The best way to make sure you’re not wasting your time on a game is to check with your state’s lottery website.

For example, I went on the Oregon state lottery website and viewed a scratch off game on there to see what prizes were left.

As you can see in the photo above, this Casino Gold game had two top prizes remaining. It lists the odds of winning too, which is handy!

To find your state lottery’s website, just open up Google, enter the term “[state name] lottery website,” and hit search.

I just entered the term “Oregon state lottery website,” for example.

If all of the top prizes for a game have been claimed, consider switching to a different one.

6. Keep your losing tickets

Keeping your losing tickets can be a good idea. This is because sometimes the manufacturer will run a second chance game where they ask for losing tickets to pick a best loser, so to speak.

Second chance drawings allow you to turn a non-winning ticket into another chance to win.

For example, at the time of writing, there were details of a second chance scratcher game on the Virginia state lottery website.

You could enter a non-winning ticket into the weekly eXTRA Chances drawing. The scratcher just had to have the eXTRA Chances logo on the front in order for it to be entered into the drawing. Prize themes change every month and, at the time, included gift cards, vacations, and concert tickets.

All you had to do was buy a scratcher with that logo and then if it was a losing ticket, you could either mail it to the Virginia Lottery or enter online with your non-winning ticket. Or you could use the app to enter the drawing.

Lots of states have second chance games like this.

So it’s worth checking with your state’s lottery website to see if there are any second chance games available.

Just as importantly though, keep hold of your losing tickets! You don’t have to spend any more cash, yet you get another chance to win.

7. Take in all of your losing tickets

Like I said above, you shouldn’t just throw out your losing cards and not only because of those second chance draws that I mentioned above.

No, another reason to not throw out a losing card is that it may not actually be a losing card.

There’s always a chance that you may have missed something on the ticket, which is why you should have your ticket officially checked.

You can have the computer at the retailer check the winnings to make sure that you haven’t missed anything. This way, you don’t throw away any winning cards!

It’s always worth doing, especially in games that have several different ways to win prizes because it can be easy to overlook winnings.

Get your ticket checked and you could win something!

8. Try the “Singleton” method

Next on the list is a tip that was used in the past by a lot of experienced scratch card players.

It’s called the “Singleton Method.”

This method involves looking at the numbers that are visible on a card before you purchase it. Basically, you analyze the card to see if you can pick up on any patterns that can indicate whether a scratch card has certain numbers, symbols, or combinations that could lead to you winning.

Now, this method isn’t really as useful as it once was because when the manufacturer’s caught on to the fact that people were analyzing the cards this way, a large number of them designed future cards to work against this method.

Still though, there may be a few manufacturers who have not yet taken steps to address this method. So you could still use it on the type of scratch cards that have numbers visible on the side.

It’s definitely an interesting theory. If you would like to learn more about how the singleton method works, then check out this guide from Casino.org.

9. Avoid package promotions

Another really useful tip I have is to avoid those “Mystery Packs” or other package promotions. This is because these promotional packages are often just a way for retailers to clear out their old stock. So they repackage older cards and then sell them in discounted ticket packages.

At first glance, it can seem like you’re getting a good deal. Who wouldn’t want discounted scratch cards, right?

In reality though, these packages are comprised of games in which the top winnings have already been claimed. This leaves you with little, if any, opportunities to win prizes yourself. It’s always best to focus on active games where there are still top prizes left to be won. That way, you have a better chance of actually winning.

10. Play them like the slots

Okay, this tip will only work if you have a lot of time on your hands and don’t mind doing some detective work, so to speak.

You’ve probably seen those people who hang around the slots waiting for someone to lose before swooping in to take that slot machine.

There’s even a Friends episode about it where Phoebe gets lurked by an older lady who always swoops in and wins right after Phoebe leaves her seat after a losing streak.

There is some science behind this method. Although the house always wins, as they say, slots do have to pay out at some point. And if a slot machine hasn’t paid off for somebody in hours, it’s likely that it will pay off for the next person who comes along.

Surprisingly, you can apply this same method to scratch cards.

Long streaks of losses can mean that your odds are better if you swoop in with a well-timed purchase.

So, how does this work with scratch cards, you ask?

Well, it’s pretty simple. Just try talking to the cashier at the store to get some information on which games have paid out recently and which ones haven’t.

That way you can play the games that not many have won yet.

While this doesn’t guarantee that you will win, it may up your chances. After all, if someone earlier bought ten tickets and lost on them all, and you buy a few, there’s a better chance your tickets will win if those previous ones didn’t.

Similarly, if another game has had lots of winners, then you’ll know which ones have paid out already, and therefore, which ones to avoid.

So keep an eye on your competition.

Good Luck!

While there’s no magic formula for winning scratch cards, there are plenty of things you can do to improve your odds and make sure that you don’t miss out on any opportunities to win!

Remember though that you should always stick to your budget. You want to keep your finances intact.

Give our tips on how to win scratch offs a try and let us know in the comments section below whether you have any tips of your own!

When people ask “What are the Best Lottery Scratch off Odds?”, they usually are referring to the overall game odds. These are the printed odds on the back of instant scratch games. You might see something like “Overall Odds of Winning are 1 in 4.05”.

These are the the odds of winning any prize, including prizes that are equal to the price of the ticket.

One of our most popular scratcher strategies is our ranking of the best Overall Odds (available free to all our members) where players can instantly compare the overall odds for each game.

However, we are here to caution you that overall odds may not be the same as the best odds of winning. How so?

State lotteries can manipulate the overall odds to make them appear among the best when in reality, the individual prize odds might be among the worst.

Let’s dive in and see an example firsthand.

How is Overall Odds Calculated?

We need to take a step back and first see how does a state lottery calculate the overall odds of winning.

For every scratch game, the state lottery will determine the prize levels (e.g. $5, $10, $100, etc.) and the total number of prizes that will be made available. For our example, I’ve pulled an actual prize chart from a state lottery website.

As we can see, there are 12 different prize levels with a total of 2,395,512 prizes available. The lottery already tells us the overall odds of winning this game are 1 in 4.12, as show below.

The lottery calculated the “1 in 4.12” overall odds by dividing the total number of tickets printed by the total number of prizes available (2,395,512).

But we don’t know how many tickets were printed.

That’s right. The number of tickets printed isn’t disclosed, BUT we can figure it out by multiplying our total number of prizes (2,395,512) by the overall odds (4.12).

The result is approximately 9,900,000 tickets printed. Note we rounded the ticket count as it’s a rough estimate but close enough.

How about Prize Odds?

Now that we have the overall odds calculation out of the way, let’s dive a little deeper and see how the odds of each prize is calculated.

In our same game example, we see that the $500 prize will have 1,247 prizes available at the start of the game. Remember, the lottery has determined they are going to print 9,900,000 tickets so among all those tickets, there will 1,247 $500 winners.

To calculate the odds for our $500 prize, we simply divide the 9,900,000 printed tickets by the 1,247 prizes and learn the odds of winning the $500 prize are 1 in 7,915.

Pretty easy, right? Here’s what all the original prize odds look like.

Now that we know how the lottery calculates the odds, why shouldn’t we use the overall odds to figure out the best scratch off odds? Can’t we just see which game has the best overall odds and play that one?

Unfortunately not. Keep reading and let me show you a couple reasons why you shouldn’t rely only on the overall odds.

Is Winning Really Winning?

First, most players would agree that just getting their money back on a scratch ticket isn’t actually winning. “Winning” the price of the ticket back gives the illusion of winning and keep players coming back but it’s really just breaking even.

Let’s take a look at our same example from above and recalculate the odds of winning a prize more than the ticket price. You know, actually “winning”.

In this example, we want to know what are the real odds of winning any prize GREATER than $5, the price of our example ticket.

To do that, we’ll sum up the total number of prizes again but this time exclude all those breakeven $5 prizes.

With the $5 prizes removed, we now see there are really 1,407,930 actual winning prizes.

Using our math skills from above, we find that the actual winning odds, or as we call them Adjusted Odds, is really 1 in 7.01 tickets is a winner. That is 9,900,000 tickets divided by 1,407,930 total prizes.

The overall odds just change by OVER 70%!

Now some players may not care as getting their money back is winning in their mind. But let’s dive just a little deeper.

The Best Odds Illusion

I’ve just shown you that all those breakeven prizes aren’t really winning prizes but are there to make the overall odds seem better. Let’s go a step further and say a lottery wanted to really manipulate a scratch game to look better than it really is.

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Below is our original prize table from the example above, but I made 2 simple changes. I lowered the $250,000 top prize from 5 prizes down to just 1 and I lowered the second top prize, $10,000, from 24 prizes down to 2.

The change looks simple enough, the total prize count change is barely, if at all noticeable. The total number of prizes only went down by 26 prizes. However, let’s check out our prize odds.

We now see a HUGE change as the top prize odds went from 1 in 1,973,902 to now 1 in 9,869,509. A whopping 5x increase in odds!

The same thing for the $10,000 second place prize. We altered the count down to 2 prizes, which changed the odds from 1 in 411,230 to 1 in 4,934,755. This was a 12x increase in odds!

But here is the very sneaky part. Did you notice the overall odds?

The 1 in 4.12 overall odds never changed.

In both cases the lottery has two tickets with the same overall odds. If you had a choice though, which one would you choose?

For the curious, where did that extra prize money go? Remember, we took away 4 prizes of $250,000 and another 22 prizes of $10,000. You guessed it, pure lottery profit.

See, in our first example the total prize pool at the start of the game was $34,077,430, which represented an overall payout to players of 69.06%.

However, in our revised numbers, the prize pool dropped $1,230,000 to a total prize pool of $32,847,430, which is now only a payout of 66.58%.

The overall odds stayed the same but the lottery is keeping an extra $1,230,000 in profit instead of paying it to players.

Bringing it All Together

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Let me show you one last example that brings both our points together. Let’s start with our original prize table again.

Now I’m going to reduce those top 2 prizes again like above BUT I’m also going to add some $5 prizes back. Let’s add 100,000 of the $5 prizes.

The lottery is still keeping a nice bonus profit by removing most of the top prizes but did shift a small piece of that money back to $5 prizes.

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Here’s what our new prize table looks like

After taking out the top prizes and adding 100,000 small $5 prizes, we have a total prize count of 2,495,486. And now the magic.

Let’s divide the same ticket count by the new prize count. For those keeping track, that is 9,900,000 tickets divided by 2,495,486 total prizes. Our new overall odds of winning are 1 in 3.95!

Just like that I gave you a ticket with the best odds of winning, yet I took away most of the top prizes AND I’ve kept a bunch of extra ticket sales as pure profit!

Conclusion

Relying solely on the overall odds of scratchers as a way to determine the best odds of winning is a recipe for disaster.

The real “best odds of winning” will vary by the player and their own strategy.

Make sure to get a FREE account here at Lotto Edge. We offer lots of free tools to help you find the games with the best odds of winning for the strategies and prizes you want.