These Texas Scratch Offs May Give You The Best Chance to Win Big

Go to the Texas Lottery Scratch Tickets page and you can get a breakdown of how many prizes have been won and how many prizes are still available for each game still in circulation. Can you use that data to give you a 'slight' edge on which tickets you should buy?

My Methodology

Instead of trying to explain how I break down the data, let me use this example. If I remove 20 cards out of a deck of 52 playing cards and none of those 20 is an ace, my chance of drawing an ace out of the remaining 32 cards has gone up.

Even if I did get one ace in the 20 cards, that's 25% of the 4 aces removed, while around 40% of all the playing cards have been removed from the deck. My chances of drawing an ace out of the remaining 32 cards are still higher than what it would have been starting at 52 cards.

Applying This to Scratch Offs

Once again, let's use an example. According to the Texas Lottery, the $5 Money Multiplier scratch-off has a total of 762,160 tickets that are $5 winners, while 523,880 tickets in the game are $10 winners.

As of the first of November, 204,180 players had won $5 and 145,577 players got lucky and won $10. That means 27% of the winning $5 tickets have been claimed, while 28% of the winning $10 tickets have been claimed. (By the way, I use the lowest two payouts because it gives me the largest sample size).

The top payout of this game is $100,000. There are a total of six tickets with that grand prize, one of which has been claimed. That means only 17% of the grand prize tickets have been claimed. That's 10% lower than the claimed prizes for the $5 and $10 tickets.

Even though there are only 5 big jackpot prizes left, I like the way the percentages slightly move to my favor.

Big Time Asterisk

This methodology applied to scratch-off tickets should be taken with a HUGE grain of salt.

The playing cards example is based in facts and mathematics, but it is a very, very small sample size. With Texas Lottery games, we are talking about millions of scratch-off cards for every game. Plus, we don't know how many overall tickets are still in circulation

My method truly does move the dial in your favor, but only very, very little. Your chance of winning a grand prize payout remains microscopically small, but if you can increase your odds by a hundredth or a thousandth of a decimal point...why not?

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