Getting Started

Before you can get started with these advanced strategies, you need to play in a state that offers you some level of game information on their website. I believe most states do this now, to varying degrees. If you are unsure of what your state offers, head to the state lottery webpage, go to the instant-tickets or scratch-offs page. If there isn’t a link there for outstanding prizes, select one of the games and the list of prizes may be shown there or by clicking on another link. Let’s take a look at a few examples. This first example is from the state of VT, it is nice because it has all of the games in one table, making them easy to compare and sort. The downside is that you have no indication of the odds or total number of winners. I happen to know that the top winners for the $30 tickets have 5 in each game. So for Cash Game, 2/5 $100k winners have been sold while only 28% of the tickets have been, so the odds are worse, while Money Mania sold 2/5 $150k winners with 80% of the tickets sold, so this gives you much better chances of winning. At the start of the game the odds were 1:60,000, that is now it is 1:20,000 to win $150k! This is just one small example of how to use this data.

The VT format is unique, and beginner friendly, so now let’s take a look at what most states provide. Below is an example game from the North Carolina website, what I call the gold standard for information, it has almost everything you could ask for. The big thing that’s missing is the amount of tickets sold, you can kind of eyeball that by looking at the smallest prize, there are so many prizes, that this correlates perfectly to the total ticket sales, a little over 50%, which is exactly what the top two prizes have paid out. What makes this the gold standard is that all of the games are on one page, or you can select a dollar amount so you can compare them. For most states you have to navigate to an individual game to see this information which makes it difficult to compare games.

All this data may seem complicated and overwhelming to analyze and it is, but there are a few strategies you may be able to use. In order to take advantage of all this data, you need to look at all of it, and even record it every day! But who would be foolish enough to do that? The Scratch’n Fool. I’ve been doing this for the VT lottery for about 5 months and recently started tracking NC. Everything is automated, so a computer downloads all of the data from each website once a day. Once you start accumulating data you can write algorithms to analyze the data. You’ll see the power of this in the various advanced strategies.