Why Play Lottery Scratcher Games?

Up until a few years ago, my experience with playing lottery games was limited to playing the occasional PowerBall or other typical drawing game when the jackpot values starting making media headlines.

But one day my girlfriend and I were walking out of a Safeway and she asked me if I wanted to buy some scratchers. I paused for a moment not knowing what she meant. "Oh, lottery scratch off games . . . " I pondered aloud and glanced at the big electronic display on a machine that until that moment hadn't even registered as existing in my mind. I had never bought or played such a game and my impression of them was that they were lowbrow – typically found for sale behind the counter of backwoods Virginia gas stations, alongside cardboard Pine air fresheners and vials of Spanish Fly. We looked at the lit up touch panel on the lottery vending machine. It had dozens of scratch off games to choose from, at price points ranging from $1 to $30. I figured it was just a waste of money and so settled on buying three different low priced games, probably $1, $2 and $5. I don't recall whether I won anything (maybe a free ticket?) but after playing the games, I contemplated the odds of winning. Not only the overall odds of winning any prize, but also the odds of winning the top prize. Or whether any of the top prizes even remained. (I've since learned that most lottery jurisdictions immediately order retailers to stop selling any games after all the top prizes have been claimed. Curiously enough, DC Lottery is not one of them . . . .) I later looked at the state lottery website and was able to find information on the number of remaining prizes and remaining tickets. And of course the tickets themselves display the overall odds of winning a prize printed in very small font on the reverse side.

But I knew those printed odds on tickets were the exact odds upon the games' release many months earlier. Over time they would have shifted. Perhaps worse. Perhaps better – relatively speaking of course for gambling. I wanted to play games whose odds had shifted in gamblers' favor over time.

This led me to searching the internet to see what I could figure out and learn. And that led me to the discovery of Joan Ginther. Oh what a great story . . . She calculated the odds of winning the top prize for a series of high prize scratcher games (in Texas) and when the bulk of tickets for a particular game had been sold with at least one remaining top prize still unclaimed (thus shifting the odds better in her favor), she bought many thousands of tickets in an effort to win the top prize. And she succeeded four times over the course of some 15-odd years. Harper's magazine wrote an article way back in 2011 about what she did and her successes along the way.

I wondered if I could do the same. Ginther had a PhD in mathematics – but that was irrelevant. Her real weapon was the fact that she was receiving some $200k a year in annuity payments from a Texas Lottery drawing win in 1993 which allowed her to bankroll her pursuits. It's an awesome story and is definitely the inspiration for me trying to do the same and what eventually led me to set up this website along the way.

But Texas . . . as of 2022, there were over 20,000 retailers spread out that huge territory. It would be near impossible to go to all of them looking for a specific game. But Joan simply picked a store in her small home town and the lottery would just keep sending additional tickets every time that store sold out of the ones she bought. No need to hunt them down: they came to her. Or at least that was her strategy – and it obviously worked.

continued on part II