5 Things to not do to get better at the lottery.

By Doug Moeller | Professional Gambler & Founder of Savvy Scratch

I spent 15+ years making a living as a professional gambler. Poker, blackjack card counting, casino advantage play, over half a million dollars in lifetime winnings. And the single biggest difference between a winning gambler and a losing one isn't talent or luck. It's avoiding stupid mistakes.

The same thing applies to scratch-offs. Most players aren't losing because the games are unbeatable. They're losing more than they should because they keep making the same preventable errors over and over again. Here are the five biggest ones I see, and what to do instead.

1. Chasing New Scratch-Off Games Just Because They're Shiny

We've all felt the pull. A brand new game hits the shelves with fresh artwork, a massive advertised jackpot, and a line of people at the gas station counter buzzing about it. Hard to resist.

But here's the thing. When a game just launched, you have zero information about the prize landscape. Everyone and their cousin is buying tickets, driving down the pool fast, but nobody actually knows what the current odds look like because the lottery hasn't reported any claimed prizes yet. You're flying completely blind.

Meanwhile, there's probably an older game sitting two slots over with significantly better jackpot odds. Why? Because most of the tickets have sold, but the top prizes are still sitting there unclaimed. The ratio of remaining jackpots to remaining tickets has actually improved since launch day.

This is the exact same logic that drives card counting. You don't bet big at the start of the shoe when you have no information. You wait until the count tells you the remaining cards favor you. With scratch-offs, the "count" is the ratio of unclaimed top prizes to unsold tickets. And new games give you nothing to work with.

What to do instead: Before buying anything, check which games in your state still have their top prizes intact and have a favorable ticket-to-jackpot ratio. Savvy Scratch tracks this data in real time across 15 states, so you can compare games before spending a dime.

2. Trusting the Printed Odds on the Back of the Ticket

See that "Overall Odds: 1 in 3.44" printed on the back? Those numbers were accurate on launch day. But scratch-off odds aren't static like Powerball. They're what gamblers call "dependent games," meaning the odds shift every time a ticket sells or a prize gets claimed.

Here's where most players get tripped up. The overall odds (your chance of winning any prize, including getting your money back) stay relatively stable throughout the game's life. The lottery designs it that way because small prizes are distributed throughout the entire print run.

But your chances of hitting that $50,000 or $500,000 jackpot? Those odds can swing dramatically. If a game launched with 4 jackpots across 8 million tickets, your starting jackpot odds were 1 in 2,000,000. If three months later, only 1 jackpot has been claimed and 4 million tickets remain, your odds just improved to roughly 1 in 1,333,333. That's a 33% improvement that the printed odds on the ticket can't tell you about.

And the reverse happens too. If 3 out of 4 jackpots got claimed in the first month but plenty of tickets remain, you're now chasing a single jackpot with terrible odds. The ticket still says the same thing on the back. The reality is completely different.

What to do instead: Stop relying on static printed odds. You need current prize claim data to make informed decisions. I wrote a full breakdown of how to use an odds calculator to pick better scratch-offs that walks through the math step by step.

3. Buying Tickets Without Checking What's Actually Left to Win

This one physically hurts to watch. Someone walks into a gas station, drops $20 or $30 on a game where every single top prize was claimed weeks ago. They have zero shot at the big money. The best they can hope for is a small consolation prize. It's like buying a raffle ticket after the drawing already happened.

But it happens constantly because most players have absolutely no idea how to check remaining prizes. The data exists on state lottery websites, but it's buried in confusing tables that require you to cross-reference multiple pages and do actual math to figure out what the current odds look like. Nobody's doing that in the checkout line.

So people default to picking games based on the artwork, the price point they always buy, or whatever the clerk recommends. None of those criteria have anything to do with whether the game still has real value left.

The difference between "this game has 4 jackpots remaining with 2 million tickets left" and "this game has zero jackpots remaining" is everything. One is a legitimate shot at life-changing money. The other is buying a lottery ticket for a prize that no longer exists.

What to do instead: Check before you buy. Every single time. Savvy Scratch color-codes games as Good, Neutral, or Bad based on remaining prize data, so you can see at a glance which games are worth playing and which ones to skip entirely. It takes 30 seconds and can save you from wasting money on dead games.

4. Ignoring Your Own Track Record

Quick question. How much did you spend on scratchers last month? Which games treated you best? Did you keep buying from a game that had already paid out all its good prizes?

If you're drawing blanks on any of those, you're probably making the same mistakes on repeat without even realizing it.

Professional gamblers track everything. When I was playing poker seriously, I logged every session: hours played, stakes, profit or loss, table conditions. Not because it's fun (it's not), but because you can't improve what you don't measure. The players who refuse to track their results are almost always the ones who overestimate their wins and underestimate their losses.

Scratch-offs work the same way. Even something as simple as noting what you bought, what you spent, and what you won back starts to reveal patterns. Maybe you notice you keep buying from the same game that stopped paying out a month ago. Maybe you realize you're spending $200 a month when you thought it was $50. Maybe you discover that certain price points consistently return better value for you than others.

The data doesn't lie. Your memory does.

What to do instead: Start tracking. Whether it's a notebook, a spreadsheet, or an app, record your scratch-off purchases and results. You'll be shocked at what you find. If you want a deeper look at how lottery analysis can transform your approach, check out the complete guide to lottery analysis on the Savvy Scratch blog.

5. Doing All This Research Manually When Better Tools Exist

Let's be realistic. Keeping tabs on dozens of active games, tracking prize payouts across your state, calculating shifting jackpot odds, and cross-referencing which games are improving versus deteriorating... that's a part-time job. And most of us have better things to do than sit at a computer crunching lottery data every day.

The state lottery websites publish the raw data, but they sure don't make it easy. It's scattered across different pages, formatted inconsistently, and requires actual math to turn into useful comparisons. By the time you've finished analyzing one game, the data has already changed.

This is exactly the problem I built Savvy Scratch to solve. The app pulls official lottery data across 15 states, crunches the numbers automatically, and shows you which games have the best remaining jackpot odds, which games have gone cold, and which tickets are hidden gems where the odds have actually improved over time.

It costs less than two scratch-off tickets per month. And it can prevent you from wasting money on dead games every time you play.

If you're still picking tickets based on pretty designs or gut feelings, you're leaving money on the table. The information advantage is there for anyone willing to use it.

Playing Smarter Doesn't Require a Math Degree

You don't need to become a statistician to stop making these mistakes. The fixes are straightforward: stop chasing new games blindly, stop trusting outdated printed odds, check what's actually left to win before buying, track your own results, and use tools that do the heavy math for you.

These are the same principles that separate winning gamblers from losing ones in every game I've ever played. Find the spots where the math favors you (even slightly), avoid the spots where it doesn't, and be disciplined enough to stick with the process.

In scratch-offs, information is the edge. The lottery isn't going to hand it to you. But it's there if you know where to look.

See which games have the best jackpot odds in your state right now →

About the Author: Doug Moeller is a professional gambler with over 15 years of experience in poker, blackjack card counting, and casino advantage play, with over $500K in lifetime winnings. He built Savvy Scratch to bring the same data-driven approach that works at casino tables to scratch-off lottery tickets. Follow Doug on X | YouTube