Tips/Strategies to increase your chances at buying "winning" scratch tickets.
Note- I use these in Massachusetts0 see how they work in your home state!
1. Every store has a trash receptacle. Make sure you walk by it on the way to the register. Chances are it will have allegedly losing tickets in it. This means someone did you the favor of weeding out the bad tickets, leaving the winners there for you to buy!
If there are a bunch of a certain kind of tix in the trash- BUY THAT KIND OF TICKET!
2.- About those tickets in the trash- There is a potential that they were put there by some little old gray-haired woman who had to use a magnifying glass to barely be able to scratch and read them. This is when it is time to swallow your pride and practice your humility and GRAB THEM! Bring them home and check them over to see if granny tossed a million bucks in the trash.
I have literally found hundreds of dollars this way. You will be amazed at how careless people are. I have even on several occasions found UNSCRATCHED tickets. Find a little "neighborhood" store that is frequented by the elderly set and you may have discovered "Scratch-topia!
3. Fat & Skinny- Stores are "supposed" to sell tix starting at ticket #299, down to ticket #000. Many stores do it backwards and start at #000. Regardless, my unscientific advice is to buy from "fat" or "skinny" books of tickets. The lottery has a habit of putting the bigger winners near the beginnings or ending of books. This is particularly true of $10 tickets. I have several $400 winners that came on ticket #299 and most of my $500 winners come in the first or last 15 tickets in a book. If you go into a store that has photocopies of winners hanging at the register, take note of the tix numbers!
4. Play Keno! Why? Because stores that have Keno usually have lotto-addicts like myself scratching tickets while they wait for the keno games to start. Often times these folks will rip through 40 or 50 tix in a book. Simply by watching them, you can learn a lot. I have scored some decent wins watching Keno Players buy strips of tickets, lose, and then I simply buy the next one or two tickets and leave the store.
5. Big Follows Small- So many times I have seen this happen. When you buy a ticket and win a smaller amount, very often a bigger winner, sometimes even a jackpot ticket, is ATTACHED TO or within a few tickets of that smaller prize. I have personally scratched a $40 winner with $500 attached, a $4 with a $400. I know of a guy who scratched a $100 winner on a $10 ticket and the VERY NEXT TICKET hit for $10,000!
6. Variety is the Spice of Life- Or is it? If you go into a store with $10 to spend, how should you spend it- Actually, you shouldn’t, you should put it into the stock market where you have a much better chance of winning! But since you are gonna buy scratch tix, I offer you two "strategies". (1).- Buy Five different $2 or ten different $1 tix from different books. The rational here is that with all those books to choose from, one is bound to be ripe and ready to cough up some dough for you! (2). Buy five of the same $2 tix or ten of the same $1 tix from the same book- The rational here is that you have a better shot at "reaching" the bigger winner in a particular book.
Either way, go with your gut and see what fate has in store for you.
7. The lottery has a web site that can be helpful when you are making choices on what to buy for scratch tix. They have a page which list "grand prizes claimed". This will tell you how many "jackpot" prizes have been claimed for 5&10 dollar tix. If a game has only 1 of ten jackpot tickets unclaimed, you may want to choose a game that has all or most of them waiting to be claimed-BY YOU!