How to Play and Win Lottery Scratch Tickets - Answering Your Questions

everybody fixin to scratch here I've been wanting to do this video forever I could ask a lot of questions one of the questions I could ask is how do you play scratch offs and how can I increase my odds of winning first let me give a quick disclaimer all the information I'm going to provide to you today is from my own personal experience and the information that I gathered from the game analytics from the Texas Lottery website one of the first questions I get asked is how do you buy Lottery scratch-off in which ticket do you buy when you walk into a store there's usually if you go to a typical store like a Valero or a Shell station there is multiple bins with lottery tickets in them and there is a number on each bin corresponding to the ticket that you'd like to purchase if you go to a 7-eleven they're usually under the glass by the front counter but every ticket will have a number associated with it now one rookie mistake right Damir is when somebody comes in and it says I went to loss areas and a cash blast so he can't see them on the backside what he wants you to say is I went to number 15 and one number 10 that way can get the right quantity and the right ticket now once you bought your ticket you scratch it off if it's a winning ticket let me give you some examples of some winning tickets so here I save some of my better wins so here's an example of a recent ticket that I purchased and this is a symbols match game it's not a numbers match game but a symbols match game it was binoculars for an auto win or if you get this little tin symbol it's a win all and I'll explain to what that is later but say you get a binocular win and you're lucky enough to win $100 on the ticket well what you do is you'll scratch off the bottom which contains a barcode now what you'll do as long as the wind is under five hundred and ninety-nine dollars or less you can take it to the clerk and they'll cash it for you if it's five if it's six hundred dollars or more then you have to go to the lottery claim office or mail it in to get paid now sometimes you might run into a circumstance where the store does not have enough money to pay you that does happen if you go early to a smaller store they may not have $100 to give to you because they don't have the cash yet so you can either go to a different store or come back later that day and normally they can pay you now let me give you some examples of certain times to ticket so this is a symbol win ticket now this is just a numbers match game basically it was a matching twenty and a twenty single match for a $100 and that's just you match the winning number to your number and you win this one you'll see sometimes you'll hear something called multipliers and this is how many times surprise is multiplied so like on this ticket this was a $50 winner because everything was multiplied times 2 so 10 20 30 40 50 this ticket was also a simple win and it means it wins 5 times so 5 times 20 it was $100 winner and then this is what you'd call is a win all when all your numbers match all the numbers down here that's a win all sometimes there's a symbol called a win all and that means you just win every prize listed on the ticket in this case it was a $500 winner now one thing I'll mention not all stores will give you back the ticket 7-eleven you'll never get a ticket back if you'd like to keep your ticket as a memento make sure before you cash it in that the store will give it back to you because once it's scanned and cashed nobody else can cash it in so you can keep the ticket but some stores are particularly light they like to have a record of the tickets that they've cashed out and they will not give them back now if you're lucky enough to win a prize of 599 dollars more that's considered a claim ticket and you get to go to the lottery claim office who recently got to do that we hid a claim ticket we had a 100 dollars times 10 which is $1,000 these tickets you cannot keep you have to sign the back of them and give them to the claim office and they'll give you check for $1,000 all right so that's how you play lottery scratch-offs now which tickets do you play now tickets are divided up by denomination there's usually one two three five ten 20 sometimes 30 and $50 tickets now normally smaller denomination tickets like one in two dollar tickets have worse odds and lower prizes than higher denomination tickets it's all about risk and reward to give you example I've got a one dollar ticket and a $50 ticket so here is a one dollar Lucky AIDS ticket and the top prize is $1,000 the odds of winning on this ticket are one in 4.91 or about one and every five now here's a $50 ticket with a top prize of almost five million dollars and the odds of winning on it are one in three point three eight all right now the question you've all been waiting for water odds and which ticket do I play well most state lottery websites will give you a game analytics or they'll give you a complete breakdown of the price structure and the odds for each prize amount all right so let's take this particular ticket for example the 500 million dollar cash ticket this is my very favorite twenty dollar ticket has the best odds of winning and it also has the best price structure in my opinion I've got a deck of cards and I'm going to demonstrate probability distribution here in a minute now each state's website normally has a game analytics which will give you price structure breakdown and odds all right so let's pull up the screen and take an example of the game analytics for the five for the million dollar cash ticket now here you can see the prize amounts and the odds for winning each prize so you've got a twenty it's one in five point five six you've got twenty five one and twelve point five well what does that mean I really get this question asked quite a bit because I'll have I was standing in line actually what spurred me to do this video is standing aligned with the gentleman that was buying a ticket he saw the odds on a five dollar ticket one in three point nine seven he bought a ticket and he goes well I just need to buy three more tickets and I'm guaranteed to win said that's not how it works alright so how does it work when a ticket says one in two point seven six that means the overall odds of winning a prize not breakeven are one in two point seven six it doesn't mean that every third ticket in a row wins it also doesn't mean that in a random sampling of three tickets one will definitely be a winner it's the overall odds based on sales distribution and number of prizes claimed now if you noticed in the game analytics now pull it up here real quick that each ticket and for at least for the state of Texas has a guaranteed minimum pay back per pack and for this particular ticket it's one hundred and ninety dollars so if you buy a whole pack of tickets the minimum that you're going to get back is one hundred and ninety dollars now one thing you'll notice that there are 25 tickets per pack which means that each pack would cost $500 if you spent five hundred dollars and bought a whole pack of tickets you're guaranteed to win at least a hundred ninety dollars back now for each denomination the number of tickets per pack differs for a $50 ticket there's 20 tickets in a pack for a ten dollar ticket there are fifty in a $5 ticket there seventy-five in a $2.00 ticket there's 125 and in a $1 ticket there's a hundred and fifty all right so let's go back to the odds now the reason I like this ticket is because you're almost guaranteed almost all the time that in a pack of tickets or one out of every 25 tickets in that pack there is going to be at least a $100 winner so odds are one in twenty four point one seven that you're going to find a $100 winner now if you look at the other prize amounts odds of hitting twenty dollars or one in five point five six odds of hitting twenty five or one and twelve point five odds of hitting thirty or one and twenty five and it's actually harder to win fifty dollars on this ticket it's one in 50 or 150 dollar winner for every two packs so what I think is confusing is that when you say the overall odds are one in two point seven six and then you see the approximate odds for each individual prize amounts they look very confusing so I've got a deck of cards to maybe explain this a little better all right so now it's time to talk about probability distribution and this is where my deck of card comes in handy probability distribution is just the probabilities of occurrence of different possible outcomes some people feel that certain numbers are lucky or there's a nice big white line it's lucky but it really is based on randomness because there is scratch-off tickets result with guaranteed number of winners and losers in each pack and they're basically spread throughout the pack randomly like a deck of cards all right so let's quickly take a look at the 500 million dollar cash prize structure because based on this information we can determine the number of prizes and how many per pack on average now there are outliers anything outlier is considered a high tier price level like $1,000 more those are just thrown in at random you can never guarantee those but remember it's a numbers game the more tickets we play the more chances we have of winning a higher prize amount all right now the fun part we get to play with our playing cards and understand probability distribution and how the prizes are spread throughout a pack and that's why I don't recommend chasing on a ticket unless you know you start with number one and you know that how many prizes left in a pack you can lose a lot of money chasing on a ticket if you've started halfway through so what I've done is I've these are blank playing cards and so what I've done I've taken 25 of these cards label them 20 to represent 25 500 million dollars and then based on the odds we know that there are typically one $100 winner in a pack there is one thirty dollar winner in a pack one $25 winner pack and if you're lucky one two three four five six seven this is gonna be a good pack of tickets and that's it now we're not gonna worry about number sequence one through twenty five because when you look at prizes they don't care about number sequence so here's our tickets here's our wins and the rest of them will be 0 these are losing tickets ok so here's what we're gonna do we're going to randomly shuffle the prizes throughout the pack and that's exactly what happens that's why you get back-to-back winners back to back-to-back winners or you can have ten losers in a row all right so this is how I recommend playing because we know there is one $100 winner in a pack once you find that $100 winner this pack is dead you would not want to play it anymore because the best chance you have may be winning a $30 ticket but you might play a 4 or 5 to get a $30 win and we don't want to do that so that's how you cut down on the risk when you play these big dollar tickets so let's take a quick look so let's say this is ticket number 1 let's see how we would do we scratching off ticket number 1 we hit 0 ticket number 2 0 take a number 3 0 4 $100 so we hit it on the 4th ticket in which means the rest of this ticket is dead so if you were chasing on a ticket and you were starting off on ticket number 1 and you found that $100 winner on ticket number 4 you didn't want to stop playing that pack you wouldn't want to play anymore that's why I don't recommend chasing because if you come halfway through the pack this one's already gone you don't have a chance of winning anything good unless you happen to get that outlier big huge prize but remember it's all about risk reward and the number of tickets that you play the more tickets you play the more chances you have of winning a higher prize amount but let's just for fun let's continue on to see what the rest of the tickets would have been like so this is a really good example of why you don't chase and once you find the biggest prize in the pack the pack is dead you don't want to play it anymore so when you're buying tickets at random that's why I say go buy one or two tickets if you win great but don't go back to that same pack I love to go to different random stores to buy random tickets because I think that increases my eyes so that was on ticket number for 100 bucks let's see what we've done on ticket number five nothing on five six nothing 7 nothing 8 nothing 9 we finally hit 20 bucks 10 nothing 11 we hit 20 12 nothing 13 there's the 25 14 there's back-to-back winners 15 0 16 we'll hit 24 sep 30 17 0 18 there's 20 19 0:20 is 20 21 where's the 30 22 23 ticket number 23 my lucky number finally he hit 30 24 25 last ticket was a win well guys I hope that helped understand probability distribution and how winners are dispersed throughout a pack you know me personally I like to play tickets that have a good payback per pack and also a good high dollar amount prize per each pack so if I'm playing a $5 ticket I want to make sure that ticket at least has won $50 winner in it if I'm playing a $20 ticket I would like to make sure that at least one ticket in that pack is $100 well with that being said we still got a lottery ticket to scratch off I almost forgot we have the 500 million dollar cash to get it is ticket number 14 let's see we can't be lucky and find a win on this ticket this is just a match you're number two the winning number if you get that star symbol it's five times surprise the bail symbol is ten times surprise all right let's see what we got thirty twelve ten eighteen get a twenty forty six 45 1950 29 got a 37 35 47 17 34 33 27 26 so close get a 23 my lucky number hey gotta win on my lucky number two well we did close out this video with a win that is awesome and on my lucky number two it can't beat that I can't find one more match but I doubt it 25 and 39 alright just matching 23 s let's see what we have under the 23 we have got $25 got a $5 profit on well everyone I hope you enjoy the video and remember the next time you buy your next lottery ticket don't rely on the back of your ticket for information regarding odds as these are just overall odds just like you would read review before going to see a movie make sure you review the real odds on your state lotteries website before buying your next ticket hope this video helped the next time you're standing in front of all those tickets that you'll make a great selection and hopefully find that big winner if you all have any questions comment below and if you'd like what you see then click that subscribe button and notification bell below so you don't miss any upcoming videos y'all were great like your rest of your day and we'll talk to you later [Music]

Channel: Fixin To Scratch

Views: 161,794

Rating: 4.7912216 out of 5

Keywords: texas lottery, scratch-off, scratch off, lottery, tips, odds, game theory, strategy

Id: scFTWMIixfA

Length: 14min 34sec (874 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 14 2018