Did you know that you could win up to $1 million by playing Texas scratch off tickets?
The lottery is a game full of dreams and optimism for most people. For those that might not want to wait for the big draw, you may go out and buy scratch off tickets to see if you will become an instant winner.
Others may want to buy these tickets as a gift for a friend or a family member.
For the jackpot of a regular lottery draw, the odds of winning may be greater than becoming president of the United States.
So, more casual lottery players may wonder if the odds of winning a scratch off ticket are that much better? Well, here is your scratch off ticket guide to improving your odds.
Buy More Texas Scratch Off Tickets
This is the most obvious advice to improving your chances, as the more tickets you buy, the more chances you have to win a scratch off game. This can be either buying tickets for the same game or even buying tickets for several different games.
Either way, the more skin you have in the game, the more likely you are to win a scratch off. Of course, make sure you do not spend more money than you can afford to on lottery tickets here.
Join a Pool
Most of the time, this is advice more directed towards lottery draws, but it can work with scratch offs as well if a group of people decides to split any jackpot prize won with the tickets.
For example, let's say that you decide to get scratch off tickets for your whole family for a reunion or a holiday party. You can agree before handing all of the tickets out that if somehow, one of the members of your family wins a prize worth tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars, that the prize will be evenly split among the family.
With this system, you could be increasing your odds of winning a big ticket by 10x or 20x depending on how many people you have in your family.
Look at Prizes
One thing that you can do is look at what prizes as specifically available for each game. Then, look at how much it costs to buy a ticket for said game.
Scratch off tickets in Texas can range from as low as $1 to as high as $20. If you are spending more money on a scratch off, then you should make sure you are getting decent prizes to go along with that.
For example, a $1 ticket may have a jackpot prize as low as $7,000. If you are a serious scratch off ticket buyer, then you will not want to buy $20 tickets just to win $7,000 in that situation.
The $20 tickets tend to have much higher jackpots going up to $1 million. Also, check the number of secondary prizes there are for each game. You may not win $1 million on a ticket, but a decent second prize like $10,000 or even $100,000 may be available on a game.
Check Claims
When it comes to the Texas lottery, the website with the first link in this article has a list of every current scratch off game in circulation in the state, the prizes that you can win from each, and the number of prizes that have already been claimed by other winners.
In Texas, it is legal to sell scratch off tickets to people even after all of the prizes have been claimed. So, there is a small chance that you may be buying a ticket in which you have no realistic chance to win.
Other times, you may be buying a scratch off ticket for a game in which almost all of the big prizes have been claimed and there is very little left.
For example, Texas at the time of writing has a scratch off game out called the Willy Wonka Golden Ticket. The top prize for said game is $100,000.
There were four of those prizes available when those tickets started going into circulation and three of those $100,000 tickets have already been submitted. So, if you were to buy a ticket for that game, you are looking for one jackpot prize, which is essentially a needle in a haystack.
But, while almost all of the jackpot tickets have been claimed for that game, there are still plenty of tickets left for the smaller prizes. So, you have to weigh that for yourself, but you should stay informed as to how many of those tickets are really still out there.
Read the Odds
Finally, you must read the fine print for what the odds are of winning any of the scratch off games. Then, you can make the most informed decision about what game would actually be worth the money.
Let's go back to the Willy Wonka game. The odds to win any prize on that one are listed as 1 in 4.15.
So, you are signing up for having a 25% chance of winning before even reading the back of the ticket, and you can also find out what prize amounts are available in advance and around how many tickets are being distributed.
The website does tell you that you need to read the full odds table on the back of a lottery ticket, so if you have the option to do so in a store, read that if you are unsure if the odds are good enough to justify buying a ticket.
Play a Smarter Lottery
These are some of the best ways that you can increase your odds of winning Texas scratch off tickets.
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