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The secret to winning lottery with Scratch off'sPrev TopicNext Topic
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This is great info Zebekyia. Please keep sharing more ideas.
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Quote: Originally posted by PendingSector on Mar 30, 2016
Zebekyia have you seen any evidence that might lend credence to the "hot roll" concept/theory frequently espoused in the scratch off threads here?
Sorry, I'm back I was auto banned for putting a link in a PM and Todd was nice enough to help me out and get me unbanned.
Yes, this is exactly correct in some games. It totally depends on the algorithm printing the game. I can give two examples to show this:
For instance; A $5 dollar game in our state called Gold Mine. Every roll that had a $250 dollar ticket in the roll would also include 2 further lower tier big "hit" tickets. I scratched probably 150 books of this game due to the promotion described earlier in this thread that included a prize board. I hit around 4 of these "Hot Rolls" that end up paying back a considerable higher percentage then what you pay for the roll.
In the 4 "Hot Rolls": It had 3 lower tier "high denomination payouts" which is atypical of a $5 dollar game. Typically you'll have 1 50 or 1 75 per roll. Once you hit this 50 or 75 you should cease to play.
$250->$75->$75-> Tickets
$250->$50->$75->Tickets
$250->$50->$100-> Tickets
$250->$50->$50->Tickets
I believe they put these into some games for players like myself. Typically if you break down every game it will have 1 "lower tier" jackpot in a book/roll. If I'm playing a book or roll and I know that it pays out "X" min. If I hit a ticket say for 50, 100, or more in a $5 dollar game am I going to keep playing this game? No, I'm not going to play this game anymore, because I know that a high percentage of the money has been won off the roll and it's likely to not have much left. To combat this some games have what you call hot rolls to prevent players like me from driving around playing a game until you hit the "lower tier" jackpot in each roll. With the concept of "hot rolls" this is not possible and combats the issue of players taking advantage of the game. The problem with "Hot Roll" games as a player described in the Florida scratchoff thread is that the min payout for a hot roll game is considerably lower than the min payout for a more "predictable" game. I tend to stay away from games that I find use the hot roll logic although after playing a lot of tickets there are tell tale signs to figuring out you are on one.
Another $5 game
For a more predictable game in which they just released the prize structure on the game. The game notes show the number of $100 dollar prizes as exactly the same as the number of books in the game. I assumed that there would be a $100 dollar ticket in every book and so far after about 35 books this has been true. This game also has a 2nd chance ticket, so essentially I use the flaw to win the $100 dollar ticket and after i hit it I buy no more. However, each roll having a $100 ticket can cause me to miss anything larger than the $100, but I'm fine with that. I have hit 500 on one of these rolls, so the rolls have a $100 ticket regardless of the higher tier jackpot prizes. With this game it's possible to turn a profit, because the way the algorithm prints and the payout percentage of teh game is 84% the highest of any game ever released in this state. So far I have calculated it to be about a 58% chance of winning money if you hit the $100 ticket before ticket 58 in which there are 100 tickets in a roll. Since the algorithm printing the tickets abides by the no more than 7 losers in a row and the min payout of 380/500 on a roll this game is very lucrative. The 2nd chance component of the game is icing on the cake as I have 17% of all entries in the 2nd chance. It's quite funny when I always win the 2nd chance and the lottery office thinks i loose 100k a year, but in reality I'm taking advantage of the games.
Each game is inherently different. If you want to talk about algorithms and how the computer prints them you have to look at the prize structure and denominations it pays out.
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Zebekyia, thank you for all this information!
Being a newbie to scratch-offs, I thought "book", "pack", and "roll" referred to the same thing (but I may be wrong!), so I'm wondering if there is a reason why you use all three terms interchangeably instead of picking one term to use?
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Quote: Originally posted by James78 on Apr 3, 2016
Zebekyia, thank you for all this information!
Being a newbie to scratch-offs, I thought "book", "pack", and "roll" referred to the same thing (but I may be wrong!), so I'm wondering if there is a reason why you use all three terms interchangeably instead of picking one term to use?
Book/Roll/Pack I use interchangeably as they all mean the same thing. Some call them books others packs and a few rolls. Sorry for the confusion.
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Good post Zebekyia.
This is one of the reasons I believe the NYS Lottery got rid of the winners Atlas and delay posting winners and updating their remaining jackpot info.
I've noticed patterns in the winner release of games like their 1 million a year for life and how they went above and beyond in keeping players in the dark while they tried to sell off remaining tickets knowing their was no jackpot winner left. Effin con artists...
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Very Interesting Read and I Completely Agree that the Lottery is HIGHLY CONTROLLED by the Lottery Administrators.
There is NO WAY scratch offs could be Truly Random. If they were, someone could win 2-3 TOP Prizes in the first week of a new scratch off release. This would Ruin the states ability to PAY Off the top prize winners and leave them holding a bunch of Scratch Offs that are totally worthless.
The Lottery is Printed with an Algorithm where there are Batches of Tickets that contain Low Dollar Prizes, middle prizes, Large Prizes, and TOP PRIZES.
The Lottery KNOWS Exactly which BATCH of tickets contains the TOP PRIZE. They could EASILY control WHERE this Batch of tickets is sent to even the EXACT STORE LOCATION that it's sent to.
If the Lottery has not made enough money, they simply HOLD BACK the Top Prize until enough tickets have been sold to satisfy their Profit Margin before a Top Prize is released.
What does this mean to You and Me as players? It means BUY FROM THE STORE that has Frequent BIG WINNERS. The Popular STORE in town where Everyone WINS. They will have lots of Fliers Showing all the $10,000+ winners that have been purchased from that store. That is the store to buy from. Don't waste your $$$ at Grocery Stores or Lottery Vending Machines. These Areas will NEVER Have a top prize. It's the High Traffic Stores that get the WINNERS...
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I sort of believe in the "pools" theory for distribution of top prizes, but I have seen cases where top prizes are claimed earlier than expected (i.e., before their pools theoretically start being distributed).
For instance, a CA Scratchers $10 game came out three weeks ago, and two of its five top prizes have already been claimed with only 16% of the total prizes claimed. Shouldn't there have only been one top prize in circulation at the time?
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Quote: Originally posted by Zebekyia on Mar 24, 2016
This is not true. While scratch may seem random they are not random at all. Of course you can blow me off and just say whatever, but after spending around 100k last year on lottery tickets and making 40k i can tell you they are not entirely random. Scratchoffs are printed by an algorithm developed with a base set of logic. There are a couple of the rules that I know and rules for each game are different based off the percentage payout of a game. To help draw you a picture of why they are not random think of scratchoffs like pull tabs. When playing pull tabs in a bar who has the advantage? The bartender. The bartender knows how many tickets have been played and how many tickets remain. Therefor if there is ever a point that the remaining money on the tickets is greater than the remaining expense the bartender could have a friend come in and play the remaining until the jackpot is hit.
You are wondering how does this apply to scratch offs. It applies, because it's the same concept on a larger scale. Think of scratchoffs just like bins of pulltabs. Pulltabs come in a vat with 1-2 top prizes. Conceptually lottery scratchoffs are the exact same. The lottery gets tickets shipped to them via pallets and the manifest from the printer. In the case of Gtech which owns a lot of the distrubution of state lotteries they are allowed to do "ticket pooling" which is a term that guarantees they make money. They are allowed to presort the tickets into pools. These pools can be thought about just like vats of pull tabs. So say they are ticket pooling a $5 dollar game and it has 10 top prizes. They will create 10 prize pools and seperate out the 10 top prizes into these pools. You can with a high amount of accuracy assume that tickets from the printer 1-10k had 1 winner 10001-20,000 had another and so on. The reason i know they do this is i studied it for over 5-8 years in which i lost quite a bit of money over this time span. The reason it's not random is if it was then they could possibly send out all the winners at the start of the game and literally loose there pants. So a couple of games that I studied to prove this. I spent 3 years driving to the stores that sold the winning tickets tracking the book numbers in which the "jackpot" ticket was sold on. When calculating the percentage in which this was printed in there became a clear pattern. I'm not going to give you all the goods, but for example say 10 top prizes on a 100,000 print game so a top prize every 10,000 tickets or 1,000 books in our hypothectical on a 100 ticket per book game. Lets say statistically there was a section of the tickets that over 80+ percent of the time the top prize was in. Given this I targeted two new games coming out. They had a 5k for life game and a 2.5k for life game. I calculated the top prize in the game to lets say between book 72000 and 84000 based off my statistical analysis. When the print got to book 68,000 guess what happened? The lottery jumped the print from 68k to 100k. They did this, because they wanted to sell the next pool "loosing non jackpot tickets" and make more money. After selling up to books 124k (2 months later) they proceeded to send out the missing section of books and the top prize was hit about 50 miles from my house and of course I drove to the store and my prediction was exactly correct. The lottery can legally manipulate when a jackpot is sent out and I believe they can even choose the store.
The lottery controls when/where/how they release the winning section of tickets. I'm to the point of believing they also know where they are going to send it based off some statistical analysis of winner patterns in our state. I can say this because for the last 15 years I've studied the patterns of lower tier winners that have to be reported and there are some gigantic anonomalies that can't be described by RNG. Let's use an example of 1k winners. I buy at a store that sells 35-40k in lottery a week. They go through an extremely high volume of scratch tickets. This store statistically should have a high number of 500+ winners. I've seen this store go 3 months without a $500 or $1000 dollar winner and in the same time span my home town in a two week time span have 20 $1,000 winners a $10,000 winner 2 $20,000 dollars winners and a $1,000,000 winner. The reason I note my hometown as an example is that it might match what this store does a week in sales for all of it's gas stations. The odds and probabilities of this happening are so unfathomable that there is no explanation unless the lottery is pulling mid tier and small winners and doing a thing I like to call "ticket seeding". To explain ticket seeding when sales in a region are down the lottery will intentionally send low tier jackpots to increase sales. Human logic would think that this store is really lucky or someone won here last week i don't want to buy here, but the opposite is true. When stores are "hot" it's more likely that sales have plunged due to the repeated lower paying out rolls being sent to your store. They'll hit a whole area of the state and you'll see an abnormal fluctuation of lower tier winners in a town or area. Our state lottery website has the winners over a certain amount and just map it out you'll see an obvious pattern that does not match their sales numbers. Over an infinite lifespan the number of winners should match sales patterns and I can tell you they don't come close.
Back to the rolls of tickets. The reason every roll of scratchoff tickets is not all winners or all losers is because it's not random at all. Every game is printed by an algorithm that tries to maximize addiction. You might be 1 off on all your numbers and you just keep buying 1 more. This is due to the things they know about humans and addiction. There are other rules in which the tickets are printed off. Say for instance on a $10 game in our state the rule of loser's in a row is 8. This is true 95% of the time and the only time I've seen it broken is on the lower tier jackpots within the roll. If you buy 7 tickets in a row and they are loser's I'll guarantee you the money for the ticket back on the 8th. To add another rule the roll has to payout a certain percentage of the cost. If this weren't true people would not win and no one would ever play. I can tell you the guaranteed payout % of 3/4ths the games in my state. On average most rolls guarantee around 54% of the money back. Knowing this scratchoffs become the pulltab scenario or the counting card scearnio. If each roll pays out X guaranteed and only this much has been won you know what's atleast left on the roll. Coupled with the number of loser's in a row on specific games you can predict winners based off the logic. Of course I'm with holding information, but you get the jist. Anyway I will say you never have a chance of winning unless they decide to send a winning roll to your store unless or unless you travel the state and play randomly. I could go on with examples and proof, but i just wanted to let you know that nothing is random whether you belive it to be. The only thing that is random to me is PB, but that's just because I can't study the ball drop patterns and the mix patterns, because in reality if you had access to that you could predict Powerball also.
If you want to hear more about how the I belive the whole thing to be rigged i'm will to go into that, because I'd like nothing more than to expose the corruption that is there.
This is an outstanding post and I couldn't agree more. Thanks Zebe!
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Quote: Originally posted by James78 on Apr 17, 2016
I sort of believe in the "pools" theory for distribution of top prizes, but I have seen cases where top prizes are claimed earlier than expected (i.e., before their pools theoretically start being distributed).
For instance, a CA Scratchers $10 game came out three weeks ago, and two of its five top prizes have already been claimed with only 16% of the total prizes claimed. Shouldn't there have only been one top prize in circulation at the time?
Sometimes the distributor messes up and will send the wrong section of the pools out first.
Break it down to where their distribution centers are and where each of the pools are located. Sometimes a state will break it's grouping up into 3 sections and pools will feed independent sections or it's all handled at one place. If there are distribution centers geographically located and not a single one you can get into scenarios where you can predict that each section of the state will get a top prize eventually "which is not fair".
I've seen 3 top prizes all hit in the same county within a week which goes along the notion of ticket seeding for a $5 dollar game. There is no way this would happen if it was random as the printing company/algorithm would never do this. The reason this would happen is due to the manual manipulation by the state lotteries.
Another reason they may choose to do this is due to the fact that people stop buying a flurry of tickets off the start of games and they'll randomly do it to make sure people believe that they can still win the top prizes off the start of games. If you always do the same thing you are very predictable. The reason they don't do it all the time is due to the fact that it kills the sales of the game over the long run and it's hard to sell the ticket when people realize a small percentage of the tickets are sold.
The last thing to think about is this. How many retailers are there and how many books are sent out at the start of the game? What's the odds of a top prize being hit. I say this because of this scenario.
In our state there are close to 5k retailers. At the start of the game they typically send out about 14.8k books. If you have a game that has a top prize in every 5-6k books it's pretty guaranteed that two top prizes should be sent out at the start of the game, but they typically hold them back. It's not entirely unheard of for 3 to be sent out, but typically they would not do this. CA has a TON more people and retailers than my state, so it depends on the print quantity and how CA distributes their pools of tickets. Never rule out human error either, because we make mistakes all the time.
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Quote: Originally posted by Zebekyia on Apr 20, 2016
Sometimes the distributor messes up and will send the wrong section of the pools out first.
Break it down to where their distribution centers are and where each of the pools are located. Sometimes a state will break it's grouping up into 3 sections and pools will feed independent sections or it's all handled at one place. If there are distribution centers geographically located and not a single one you can get into scenarios where you can predict that each section of the state will get a top prize eventually "which is not fair".
I've seen 3 top prizes all hit in the same county within a week which goes along the notion of ticket seeding for a $5 dollar game. There is no way this would happen if it was random as the printing company/algorithm would never do this. The reason this would happen is due to the manual manipulation by the state lotteries.
Another reason they may choose to do this is due to the fact that people stop buying a flurry of tickets off the start of games and they'll randomly do it to make sure people believe that they can still win the top prizes off the start of games. If you always do the same thing you are very predictable. The reason they don't do it all the time is due to the fact that it kills the sales of the game over the long run and it's hard to sell the ticket when people realize a small percentage of the tickets are sold.
The last thing to think about is this. How many retailers are there and how many books are sent out at the start of the game? What's the odds of a top prize being hit. I say this because of this scenario.
In our state there are close to 5k retailers. At the start of the game they typically send out about 14.8k books. If you have a game that has a top prize in every 5-6k books it's pretty guaranteed that two top prizes should be sent out at the start of the game, but they typically hold them back. It's not entirely unheard of for 3 to be sent out, but typically they would not do this. CA has a TON more people and retailers than my state, so it depends on the print quantity and how CA distributes their pools of tickets. Never rule out human error either, because we make mistakes all the time.
Also, think of this. Normally top prizes are hit at the back of a section of tickets or prize pool and in what the last 15%? Do you think they sent the front or the back out first :).
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I have some input on the theories posted here
First of all, I do not believe winning the lottery is fate.
You can't play if you don't win and if you buy more tickets you stand more of a chance to win.
It "can" only take $1 but if you play more your odds are better. It's about spending an amount
your comfortable with losing and understanding that on the whole these games are designed to
be profitable. That means some will win, but many more will lose and more money will be taken
in then will be paid out.
Secondly, while I do tend to agree the lottery knows where these tickets are.... I highly doubt
the distribution is along the paths of, for example, if there are 4 top prizes in a game with a print
run of a million cards that each winner will fall around every 250,000th book. I would agree that
they probably know where the winners are, to a degree, and they do not send them out all at once
in the beginning so they don't lose money on the game... but to say it's going to be within a certain range
of books is something I just don't agree with. I could say that each top prize will be +/- 30,000 books of the
250K book mark but that's quite a bit of variance. I'd also like to give the companies that run these games
more credit than that... you'd hope people would be smarter then to follow that path. If you did know within
a certain threshold that certain book ranges would contain the jackpot tickets then you could increase your
odds greatly. Do I think it really matters to the average player? Not really... your talking about a potential
range of something like 60 thousand books of tickets. An average player might play 100 or 200 tickets all year long.
This might benefit hard core players more, like those spending tens of thousands of dollars on the lottery. But at
the end of the day I don't see it following such a predictable pattern.
I know here in PA a million dollar winner was sold in the first two weeks of a game being out... I don't know the pack
number but I bet it wasn't very high after two weeks of sales. I'd certainly think not 1/5 of the print run as there were
5 top prizes.
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Quote: Originally posted by GetReal720 on Apr 20, 2016
I have some input on the theories posted here
First of all, I do not believe winning the lottery is fate.
You can't play if you don't win and if you buy more tickets you stand more of a chance to win.
It "can" only take $1 but if you play more your odds are better. It's about spending an amount
your comfortable with losing and understanding that on the whole these games are designed to
be profitable. That means some will win, but many more will lose and more money will be taken
in then will be paid out.
Secondly, while I do tend to agree the lottery knows where these tickets are.... I highly doubt
the distribution is along the paths of, for example, if there are 4 top prizes in a game with a print
run of a million cards that each winner will fall around every 250,000th book. I would agree that
they probably know where the winners are, to a degree, and they do not send them out all at once
in the beginning so they don't lose money on the game... but to say it's going to be within a certain range
of books is something I just don't agree with. I could say that each top prize will be +/- 30,000 books of the
250K book mark but that's quite a bit of variance. I'd also like to give the companies that run these games
more credit than that... you'd hope people would be smarter then to follow that path. If you did know within
a certain threshold that certain book ranges would contain the jackpot tickets then you could increase your
odds greatly. Do I think it really matters to the average player? Not really... your talking about a potential
range of something like 60 thousand books of tickets. An average player might play 100 or 200 tickets all year long.
This might benefit hard core players more, like those spending tens of thousands of dollars on the lottery. But at
the end of the day I don't see it following such a predictable pattern.
I know here in PA a million dollar winner was sold in the first two weeks of a game being out... I don't know the pack
number but I bet it wasn't very high after two weeks of sales. I'd certainly think not 1/5 of the print run as there were
5 top prizes.
If you did know within a certain threshold that certain book ranges would contain the jackpot tickets then you could increase your odds greatly.
How? If the game and books were sent out sequentially yes, however they are taking the prints now and sending out the front with the back "overage" tickets to presell all the losers. Take for instance it doesn't matter that I can predict the section of tickets or books within a 15% range with a 80% probability, because why? Take for instance the latest distribution method. Pools which are super randomized. The store I go to off the front of the game got books 7677, 21,567, and book 46,101. With 8 top prizes and 48k books you're looking at 1 every 6k books. I'd buy from the 21,567 roll and the 46,101 roll, but not the 7677 roll. It doesn't matter that I can predict what section of the books, because I have no idea when they are going to send them out or where. It would matter if i stuck to only playing certain sections and literally drove around all day all over the state searching I could increase my odds 10 fold, however no logical human would do this. I appreciate your thoughts and the one that I agree with is this: The average player might play 100 or 200 tickets per year. Yes I agree with that. However, I'm not an average player and I might play 100 or 200 tickets at once or in the past 10,000 tickets at once depending on the denomination.
If a million dollar winner was sent out in the fist two weeks on a game that has 5 winners which would be a winner every 20% of the ticket and 15% of the tickets were sent out on the initial run I don't see that as odd at all. I don't see your arguments and if you had more fact to back your argument I would bow, but after years of analyzing data I can say and state the things in these posts.
They do know where the winners are and what sections they are in. The reason I know this is do to the following scenario. A year ago when a promotion was released explained early in this thread I and another guy were the only two people to catch on to the ludicrousness of it. Basically the deal was that for every 150 dollars i spent i got 215 dollar worth of free tickets. With a min payout of 54% of course we bought as much as we could. What we ran into when he hit 10k twice was this. At one of the promotions the lottery rep was on the phone trying to get more tickets to the event. When they release the tickets to an event they have to mark what books were sent and tie them to a store or in this case the promotion. After you go to these events and get to be good friends with the lottery reps you get to see the inner workings and on both days the people in charge of ticket distrubution wanted to refuse to release the section of tickets. I've never heard of this before and I overheard the conversation taking place. They kept saying the tickets weren't ready and they weren't ready to release this section. We previous to this had never won more than a $250 dollar ticket on a "hot roll" and go and behold that day person "X" as I'll call him won two 10k's from the tickets they didn't want released. Also, that day two 1k prizes were won. To give you an idea of how much money we were spending at these lets just say I walked out with 4 reusuable grocery bags filled with $5 dollar books ($500) per book. To give you a picture I bought 26 (2600 tickets) at the last promotion for 13k and got 37.26 books for free or 3,726 tickets. Odds of hitting 1k were 1 in 101 books and I bought 63 books of tickets that day which includes the free one's and I got nothing/nada zilch in terms of higher denomination tickets. Let's just say i went to 10-15 of these and each time except the day we heard the argument on the phone neither of us won anything over 250 dollars on the roll for the higher denomination tickets. With the volume of tickets we bought the odds/probability of not hitting atleast 1k are way less than 1%. The bottom line is they know exactly where they go and who they are sent too. Also, since the algorithms are predictable jackpot prizes are predictable. The only thing that used to be predictable is thier distrubution pattern and now they've randomized it too.
If you want to know where that 1 top prize went that was never claimed i can tell you how they are illegally getting wrid of it, but hey if you want to belive it's fair keep playing and maybe you'll be lucky one day. -
I'm sure the state lotteries prefer top prizes to be hit as late as possible. I prefer that too because it improves the odds (a tiny bit) of hitting a top prize since more tickets would have been sold... But it seems top prizes get claimed when I least expect it.
My way of determining the "life" of the game is the percentage of its total prizes claimed (TPC); it's probably the wrong metric, but it's the only simple metric my newbie lottery brain can visualize right now.
The first scratchers I played was $10 Set for Life, which has 4 top prizes. Top prize #1 was claimed at 10% of TPC. Top prize #2 was claimed at 32% of TPC. Top prize #3 was claimed at 51% of TPC. It is currently at 62% of TPC.
Then I starting playing $20 Extreme Green because of its better overall odds of winning. It has 4 top prizes. Top prize #1 was claimed at 21% of TPC. Top prize #2 was claimed at 33% of TPC. Top prize #3 was claimed at 51% of TPC. It is currently at 51% of TPC.
I was considering $5 Set for Life at one point, which has 6 top prizes. Top prize #1 was claimed at 5% of TPC. Top prize #2 was claimed at 23% of TPC. Top prize #3 was claimed at 24% of TPC. Top prize #4 was claimed at 48% of TPC. It is currently at 53% of TPC.
I'm currently playing $20 Max-A-Millions because only 1 of its 4 top prizes has been claimed. Top prize #1 was claimed at 12% of TPC. It is currently at 54% of TPC, so I believe it is well overdue for top prizes #2 and #3 to be claimed. However, I am having very bad luck on this game, so I might switch to lower-priced games to try to raise some funds.
Maybe some state lotteries have a habit of putting out top prizes early? The way things are going, I think they'll either have to pull games early or add more prizes--which could potentially imbalance the odds as old stock would have no top prizes left and new stock would probably be trickled in slowly (and top prizes held back) until all old stock is sold.
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I'm pretty sure that there is no strategy that will work for scratchers. Of all the lotto games out there, scratchers are the only one where there is no strategy to increase your chances of winning. It's just pure luck if you win....just my 2 cents worth.
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Quote: Originally posted by SWMcCaig on Apr 24, 2016
I'm pretty sure that there is no strategy that will work for scratchers. Of all the lotto games out there, scratchers are the only one where there is no strategy to increase your chances of winning. It's just pure luck if you win....just my 2 cents worth.
I think you are ignoring the analysis and research. Of course I would think the same if I wanted to believe something to be random. However, I'm not going to try and change your mind. I can say after tons of research and many lessons learned there are many strategies to increase your odds and not thinking so is ignoring obvious facts.