Scratch Cards/Lottery

Send me $1,000 and I'll send you $500 back, and call it a day.

 

I had a little program running, where I would save my cans and platic bottles, recycle them, and with the refund money, I would buy scratchers. It worked pretty well, the first couple of times I doubled the money I spent, but it never lasted. It depends on the scratchers. $1 scratchers are for winning "tickets." The $3 scratchers give you better money if you win. highier odds for some.

Gambling is the root of all evil.

 

In other words, you had a system just like a street bum with a shopping cart would have?



RMX

 

I don't think you can buy that many at a time and if you want to the shop owner may have a few boxes for you to use.

Likewise, if 1/2 the box has been used and the shop owner hasn't seen any big winners, it makes sense for him to toss the remaining tickets in the garbage to keep the now higher percentage of winning tickets from being claimed.

Good luck.

The only way to increase your odds in any form of gambling is to stack the deck in your favor in some way. Take the F1 betting I do, I only place money down if I have a very good idea of what's going to happen. Take a look at the history and the weeks leading up to the race etc. There may be 20 men racing and all have odds but how many can actually win? Right there you're increasing your chances.

It's still not a sure bet but it's better than drawing a name out of a hat.

 

It won't work because of the annoyance factor. Ever notice how these brain dead people buy a scratch card and then stand in line while they scratch it. If they win they think they are still in line and can instantly buy another card while everybody waits patiently in line. Try this with 1000 cards and I bet we will see some action.

 

From a statistic I heard somewhere, if you ***invest*** $XXXX in scratch tickets, you'll get roughly 25% of that back...

 

In Ontario there was a huge scratch and win scam going. The clerks at the lottery terminals knew a code and if they made a tiny little scratch at the bottom of the card and saw the code they knew if it was a winner or not.

They say 1 in 10 of all lottery prizes is won by the lottery clerk.

 

here in missouri, on the lottery's website, you can see the total number of prizes alotted and how many of those are left. which means, if you're a statistician, which of course i'm not, you could use this info to win big. scratchers are cool, and yes, i've donated my fair amount to schools through them, but i'm waiting the extra 1 year, 4 days until i get to vegas to perfect my casino skills.
here's a link to the mo lottery's webpage with the info on it: http://www.molottery.com/app/scratchers.do

 

I used to dabble in scratch offs quite a bit when I worked as a 7-11 clerk in high school.

You need to know a bunch of things to help the odds move to your favor. You need to know how many tickets are alotted per game. You need to know how many prizes have been given out. You can use that to figure out how many winners/tickets there are. That data can get drilled down to figure out how many winners/tickets for each particular prize there are.

As a 7-11 clerk back in the day, that info was readily available in the literature the lottery commission would give out with the packs of tickets. I think nowadays its probably on the State website or something.

I worked on expected values. I would track the number of tickets we sold per pack that were consecutive losers. (Most people scratched the tickets off right there.) When the odds were favorable, I would buy the next ticket. I won much more often than I lost - never anything big; 20 here, 50 there.

My advice to anyone purchasing scratch offs blindly without tracking tickets or knowing the odds: go for the 5 or 10 dollar tickets. The $5 tickets are usually roughly 1:5 winners, and the $10 tickets are roughly 1:3 winners. Of course, the only tickets were the lowest payoff is higher than the cost of the ticket are the $1 tickets - unfortunately, the odds usually aren't favorable.

 

Not quite. Lol, I don't do it anymore, it was just a way for me to have some fun. I got tired of recycling.

As someone on this board once said: "The lottery is a tax for people who are bad at math."

 

Wrong---BOREDOM is the root of all evil.