Total Sales

This is a fairly easy strategy to understand. It only uses the latest data published on the website, and it simply compares the amount of total prize money paid out to what should have theoretically been paid out based on the ticket sales. Let’s take a simple example, we have a $10 ticket with 25% of the tickets sold with a current payout of $540,000. We know the entire prize pool is $2,000,000, so if 25% of the tickets have been sold then $500,000 in prizes should have been paid. So for this game, $40,000 more has been paid out compared to what should have been paid out. Next you want to compare this to the other games in order to determine which game is the best to play based on this strategy. In order to do this you need to normalize the values to $1. Since this is a $10 ticket, you need to divide the $40,000 by 10, so the algorithm would report $4,000 for this game, which isn’t what you want, you want to look for are games with large negative numbers!

Here’s an example of this algorithm run on the VT Lottery [the data is not current]. There are a few reasons I don’t like this algorithm as you’ll see below. Currently the table is sorted with the most negative payouts at the top, which should be the best to play, however, as you can see most of those games have sold well over 90% of the tickets. The reason they look so attractive is that they are being skewed by a lot of winners that haven’t been claimed for various reasons…lost tickets, didn’t know it was a winner, not worth the effort [which is why many of them are $1 games]. The other reason this table can be misleading is that it is heavily weighted by the big winners. So if you scroll down to game 1839 it looks attractive because there are a lot of big winners remaining, while game 1828 is the worst because most of the big winners have been sold. So, if you want to know which games are best for big winners, take a look at the big winner strategies. If you want a better version of this analysis, take a look at the recent sales strategy. Note, if you only want to see $5 tickets, type $5 in the search window.