Big Winner Deltas

I’m not sure how many people only play scratch tickets to get the headline big winners, sure it would be nice, but most play to win and have fun, plus the odds of getting one are much better than with PowerBall! The main purpose of this strategy is to showcase which games have the most [and least] big winners to help you decide which game to play. If you usually play a $5 ticket, wouldn’t you want to play a ticket that has a lot more big winners in it compared to ones with little or none remaining? The way this strategy works is that it looks at the three biggest winners in each game and compares how many are left to how many have been sold. I’m sure many of you have done this to some extent. There are two ways to look at this data, first, you can just look at the # of big winners left, maybe they are all $1 million winners or all are $10k winners, who knows, that’s why you need to also look at the combined prize pool of those winners also since there could be just one $1 million winner only. The data below is an example from the North Carolina lottery. The % Sold column is the total number of tickets sold, Count % is the total number of big winners left compared to how many tickets have been sold, and the last is the value of the big winners left compared to the value of big winners that should be left based on sales. So bigger negative numbers are better and ideally they would both be negative.

Let’s take a look at an example from the table below, which is sorted by Dollars %. The first game in the table has 78.6% of the tickets sold and -2.4% less than that in big winners actually sold, not very exciting. If you go to the NC lottery website, you would see that 32/42 big winners have been sold compared to the ideal number of 33. But what’s more impressive with this game is the Dollar % of -46.3%, that means only 32.3% of the big winner money has been paid out! If you go to the website again you’ll see that it’s because only 1/4 $2 million winners have been sold, when statistically, three should have been sold. So again, it’s best to have a larger negative number the last column, as well as a negative number in the Count %. Of course the opposite is also true, so if you look at the games with the largest positive numbers, those are the games you should be staying away from. If you’re curious about a game, just head to the website and take a look at it, to see what the data is telling you, and if you only play $10 tickets, just put $10 in the search window to filter out the other games.