I've been buying scratch off tickets for years and have won my fair share of prizes, but lately it seems that I've been hitting a very hard dry spell!
I've never scratched at the store - always bought the tickets and waited until I got home. If I didn't win, I'd go back and buy 2 or 3 more and always won something, even if I didn't break even.
Lately, though, it seems that every store that I go to (I live in NYC, so there is a store on every block - probably 10 stores in my area that are about least ten minutes away from where I live) where I buy scratch off tickets have been coming up blanks. I like to buy the ten dollar tickets, so a few weeks ago when the new "Money" ticket came out, I bought five in a row. Nothing. I went to another store, bought a few - nothing. This pattern has become more frequent in the last few weeks.
I've noticed that more and more people are scratching their tickets at the stores. Some of these people spend hours at these places. Tonight, for example, I bought three tickets (#20, 19 and 18). Nothing. I went back to the store a few minutes later to buy more but someone bought the next ticket (17). So I bought the next in the series - three more (#16, 15 and 14). Nothing.
I'm learning to not buy tickets from these stores. It just seems to me that people who are buying these tickets are scratching them at these stores until they get a winner, and then leave the losers for the suckers (like me) to buy 'em!
Maybe I'm just having a real bad streak here..