How It Works
The math behind picking better scratch-off tickets.
The Math Behind the Rankings
Most people pick scratch-off tickets by gut feel: the flashiest design, the biggest top prize, or whatever's behind the counter. But every scratch-off game has publicly available odds data, and that data tells a very different story than the marketing.
Serious Scratchers analyzes this data every day to rank every active game in your state by current rate, the single best measure of whether a ticket is a good deal relative to its price.
What is the Rate?
The rate tells you how much money you'd get back, on average, for every dollar you spend. A rate of 70¢ means you'd expect to get back 70 cents per dollar over many tickets.
Example: A $5 scratch-off
Imagine a $5 game with 1,000,000 tickets printed. The prizes total $3,500,000. The rate is $3,500,000 / (1,000,000 × $5) = 70¢. For every $5 ticket, you'd expect $3.50 back on average. That's better than most games, which return closer to 50¢ to 60¢.
Crucially, rates change over time as prizes get claimed. A game that started at 60¢ might improve to 75¢ if low-value prizes are claimed while top prizes remain, or worsen if the top prizes are gone. We recalculate daily.
How We Score Each Game
Our Serious Score weights multiple factors to surface the best overall games:
Games are ranked within each state. Rate and big win probability are compared within the same price tier, so $1 tickets compete against other $1 tickets, not $30 tickets. Paid members can switch between four ranking modes: Best Overall, Any Win, Best Value, and Jackpot Hunter.
Why Prize Availability Matters
State lotteries publish how many of each prize tier have been claimed. This is the key data point most players ignore. When a game's top prizes are gone, the remaining tickets have a worse expected value, even though the game is still on sale.
We track remaining prizes for every tier and recalculate rates based on what the state reports as still available, not the original print run. This gives you a current picture of each game's value rather than the one printed on the back.
What our numbers can't see
Prizes above a certain amount have to be claimed at a lottery office rather than at the store, so there is a gap between someone winning a prize and the state reporting it claimed. Our counts come from those reports, which means remaining-prize numbers, and the rates built on them, can run slightly generous.
The useful part is that the error only runs one way. If a game shows its top prizes gone, they are gone. If it shows prizes remaining, some may already have been won and still be working their way through the state's claims process. So when you are deciding what to skip, treat that as the stronger signal.
Data Sources & Update Frequency
All data comes directly from official state lottery websites. We scan prize data nightly or daily depending on the state:
- California: Updated nightly (~2:30 AM PT)
- Texas, Florida, New York, Virginia: Updated daily
Guests see data with a 7-day delay. All registered accounts, including the Free plan, get real-time access to the latest rankings.
Ready to find better tickets?
Browse your state's rankings and see which games are worth buying right now.