Sequential Tickets

This strategy involves buying a certain number of tickets within the same book, all in a row, in order to gain an advantage. Many people have different theories on how many you should buy, so ultimately it is up to you. You also shouldn’t spend more than your budget just to follow the strategy. If you usually buy one ticket after work, then this strategy isn’t for you. If you’re buying one ticket, it doesn’t matter which game you choose, they are all uncorrelated, unless you know about the history of a particular game. Let’s say you finally got an outlier with a $50 win on a $5 ticket, then you certainly should stop playing that book of tickets. So, can you gain an advantage buying several tickets in a row? Absolutely! That’s because scratch tickets aren’t random, if you don’t understand this click here. Sequential tickets requires a strategy to get the most benefit. If you’re not using a strategy and want to buy 5 tickets, you should never buy one ticket from 5 different games, that’s because each one of those books of tickets are uncorrelated and you are getting truly random odds. Since there are a certain amount of winners in each book, you are better off buying 5 from the same book. Every losing ticket bought also gives you a better chance of winning in that book. If tickets were truly random, then there would be no additional benefit when buying them in a sequence. Think of Powerball, when you buy 5 tickets, your getting 5x better odds of winning and that’s it, there’s no additional benefit in buying more tickets because the last 5 lost.

The best way to get an advantage with doing this strategy is to keep track of what you’ve played. Some of this is obvious and some is based on your judgement. Here’s an example of what just happened for me, I bought 5 $5 tickets and got a $20 and $50 winner, a good winner and an outlier. When this happens, you stop playing that book of tickets completely, switch to a different game or store. Let’s also say you get 3 or 4 winners out of 5, trust me it happens, then you should probably also stop playing that book. If you only get one outlier out of 5, I would also stop playing that book because the odds of getting another outlier in that book is zero. If you get 0 or 1 winner out of 5, then you have to buy 5 more tickets the next time you play, that’s because, although you unfortunately lost, you now know the odds of getting a winner is much better now. There’s somewhat of a gray-zone if you get 2 or 3 winners and they are all minimum or close to minimum. In this case, you may want to take a break from that book and jump back in later, whatever you think.

I used 5 tickets as an example, but it’s not a hard and fast rule, you can use your judgement here and it also depends on what games you’re playing. I think 5 is a good number for tickets $5 and under, there are a lot tickets in these books and the odd of winning are a little worse than 1:4. As you start getting to higher dollar tickets, book sizes get smaller and odd can be better than 1:3, so switching to a 2 or 3 ticket strategy is advised.