Powerball vs. Scratch Tickets
What are the differences between playing Powerball and scratch tickets? Is one better than the other? Before getting started, you should check out “are scratch tickets really random”. For this comparison, I’m going to use the North Carolina Lottery $10 Million Dollar Triple Play [996] which has a top prize of $1,000,000. Obviously, you can win a lot more with Powerball, but it’s interesting to note that the odds of winning a $100 million dollar jackpot is the same as winning a $1 billion jackpot. The next important thing to realize is that Powerball is truly random while scratch tickets are deterministic. As an example of what that means, let’s play dice. Everyone knows the odds of rolling a 2 are 1:6. We also know you can roll the same number twice in a row and roll several times before seeing a match. In fact, if you repeat rolling 10 times at a time, one in about six times you won’t get a match in ten rolls! This is the fundamental basis of randomness and is why Powerball some times has extremely large jackpots. Using this analogy for scratch tickets, the odds of rolling a 2 are still 1:6, but with scratch tickets, if you roll the die 6 times you are guaranteed to get one 2! This is exactly why scratch tickets aren’t random, and give you a big advantage over Powerball and many other forms of lottery. If Powerball was run like scratch tickets, then you would be guaranteed a jackpot winner in every 292,201,338 tickets sold, sure it would be random within those tickets, but in theory, it could be sold with the first ticket or last.
OK, let’s ignore the jackpot for Powerball and compare some of the other prizes common to both. The odds of winning $1,000,000 in Powerball is 1:11,688,054 which equates to you spending over $23,000,000 to win a million…and as we’ve shown before, since Powerball is truly random, it could easily be 1:30,000,000 before you win. In our scratch ticket example, the odds of winning $1,000,000 is about 1:1,500,000 but it’s a $10 ticket, so you would have to spend $15,000,000 on average to win. So you have a much better chance to win with scratch tickets, especially knowing there are 5 guaranteed winners in 7,500,000 tickets. Even though there are 5 winners you don’t know if they come out early or late in the game, that’s the beauty of the sales data on the website, you can look for yourself. In this example, only 1 of 5 [20%] have been sold, compared to 37% of tickets that have been sold, so another winner is due soon! Compare that to a similar game which has 3 of 5 million dollar winners sold with less than 50% of tickets sold. Which one of those tickets would you want to buy? Learn more about this in the Advanced Strategies section.
Finally, let compare the odds for winning $100. In Powerball it’s 1:10,376 which would cost you about $20,000. In the scratch ticket example used above, the odds are 1:60 which would cost you $600. How does Powerball look now?