5 Ways to Actually Improve Your Chances of Winning the Lottery

Most lottery advice is recycled garbage. "Buy more tickets!" "Pick lucky numbers!" "Rub the ticket on your cat!" Here's what actually moves the needle when you're buying scratch-offs.

You're standing at the gas station counter, staring at a wall of scratch-off tickets. Forty-something games, all screaming about million-dollar jackpots and "YOUR CHANCE TO WIN BIG." You pick one. Maybe it's the cool-looking design. Maybe it's the price point you always grab. Maybe it's whatever the cashier can reach fastest.

Here's the part nobody tells you at the counter: the game you just picked might already be dead.

Not "bad odds" dead. Not "unlikely" dead. The top prize was claimed three weeks ago and the lottery commission is still selling tickets to a game where the biggest possible win is already gone. That happens more often than you'd think. And it's completely legal.

If you've ever had that gut feeling that something about scratch-offs doesn't add up, you're not wrong. The system isn't rigged, exactly. But the deck IS stacked against players who don't check the data before they buy. The good news? Fixing that is simpler than you think.

Here are five ways to actually improve your scratch-off lottery odds. Not theories. Not superstition. Not "systems" some guy is selling on YouTube. Just math and strategy that give you a real edge over players who buy blind.

1. Check Remaining Prizes Before You Buy (This Is the Big One)

Every scratch-off game launches with a fixed number of top prizes. As tickets sell and prizes get claimed, the odds shift. But here's the part the lottery commission doesn't advertise: they keep selling tickets to games after the top prizes are gone.

Think about that for a second. You pay $20 for a ticket advertising a $2,000,000 jackpot. But that jackpot was claimed last month. There are still 800,000 tickets on shelves across the state. The lottery is still making money. You're still buying. And you have zero chance of winning the prize on the front of the ticket.

This isn't a conspiracy theory. It's how the system works. Every state lottery website publishes remaining prize data, though most bury it deep in their sites where casual players would never find it. The data is there, but it's hard to read and almost impossible to compare across games unless you want to spend an afternoon in a spreadsheet.

Here's the concept that makes this click. Card counters track which cards have been dealt to know what's left in the deck. Checking remaining prizes is the scratch-off version of counting cards. The "deck" is the prize pool. As prizes get claimed, the deck changes. If you're not checking what's left before you buy, you're playing blind.

According to recent analysis, roughly 10% of scratch-off games still on shelves have zero top prizes remaining. That's one in ten games at the counter where you're paying full price for a ticket that literally cannot win the advertised jackpot. You wouldn't buy concert tickets after the show was cancelled. Why buy a scratch-off after the top prize is gone?

What to do: Before your next scratch-off purchase, look up the remaining prizes for that game on your state lottery website. If the top prizes are gone, walk away. Sounds simple. Almost nobody does it.

If you want this done for you automatically across every active game in your state, that's exactly what Savvy Scratch does. Every game rated Good, Neutral, or Bad based on real-time prize data. Takes about 10 seconds to check before you buy.

2. Stop Buying Cheap Tickets in Bulk (Quality Beats Quantity Every Time)

Here's a scene that plays out at every gas station in America. Someone walks up to the counter with $20 and buys ten $2 tickets instead of one $20 ticket. Feels like more chances to win, right? More scratching, more excitement, more shots at a prize.

The math says otherwise.

A $1 or $2 ticket typically gives you overall odds of around 1 in 4.5 to 1 in 5. That means roughly 80% of those tickets are complete losers. A $20 or $30 ticket? The overall odds often improve to around 1 in 2.75 to 1 in 3.5. More importantly, the prize structure is completely different. Higher-priced games have bigger prize pools, better top prizes, and the ratio of "meaningful" wins (not just getting your two bucks back) is significantly higher.

There's a reason this matters beyond just odds. When you spread your money across ten cheap tickets, you're essentially taking ten small, low-quality bets. Each one has mediocre odds and a low prize ceiling. When you concentrate that same money into one well-researched ticket, you're taking a single, higher-quality bet with better odds and a higher potential payoff.

Professional poker players call this "playing up." Sometimes the smart move isn't to play more hands at a low-stakes table. It's to play fewer hands at a higher-stakes table where the edge is better. Same principle applies here.

What to do: Instead of buying five $5 tickets, consider buying one $20 ticket from a game where you've already checked the remaining prizes. Fewer tickets, better odds per dollar, and you've verified the top prizes are still in play. That's how you get more value from the same money.

3. Play Newer Games (The Freshness Factor Is Real)

When a scratch-off game first launches, the prize pool is 100% intact. Every jackpot is available. Every second-tier prize is unclaimed. As weeks and months pass, the best prizes get picked off. The game gets older. The odds sometimes get worse and sometimes get better. But the ticket price stays exactly the same.

You'd never buy a carton of milk without checking the expiration date. But most people buy scratch-off tickets without checking how long the game has been running or how many prizes have already been claimed.

Newer games have a mathematical advantage simply because nothing has been removed from the prize pool yet. This doesn't mean every new game is automatically better than every older game. A well-structured older game with prizes still intact can absolutely be the better play. But all else being equal, newer games give you a fuller deck to draw from.

There's also a psychological benefit to playing newer games. You know you're playing games with all the prizes remaining effectively gives you the best potential chances at the most of those prizes that are available.

Most state lottery commissions announce new game launches on their official websites. Some states launch new games monthly. Others do it quarterly. Either way, the information is public and free. You just have to look.

What to do: Pay attention to when new games launch in your state. A freshly launched game with all prizes intact is a fundamentally better bet than an older game that you don't know whether the odds have gotten better or worse. Bookmark your state's lottery new game page and check it regularly. Or just check it in the Savvy Scratch app.

4. Follow the Jackpot Odds (They Move More Than You Think)

Here's something most scratch-off players don't realize: the odds of hitting the jackpot on a specific game can change dramatically over the life of that game. Not by a few percentage points. By multiples.

Every scratch-off game launches with a set number of tickets printed and a set number of top prizes. As tickets sell, the total pool of remaining tickets shrinks. If the jackpot hasn't been claimed yet, your odds of hitting it improve with every ticket someone else buys. The jackpot is still sitting there, but there are fewer tickets between you and it.

Say a game launches with 3,000,000 tickets and 4 jackpots. Your initial odds of hitting a jackpot on any single ticket are 1 in 750,000. Six months later, 2,000,000 tickets have sold and all 4 jackpots are still unclaimed. Now there are 1,000,000 tickets left with 4 jackpots still in the pool. Your odds just improved to 1 in 250,000. Same game. Same ticket price. Three times better jackpot odds.

That's not a rounding error. That's a massive shift, and it happens all the time across every state.

Now flip it. A different game launched with 3 jackpots, and 2 have already been claimed. There's 1 jackpot left in a pool of 1,500,000 remaining tickets. Your odds: 1 in 1,500,000. Meanwhile, the game next to it on the shelf has better jackpot odds by a factor of six. They cost the same. They look equally exciting at the counter. But mathematically, they're completely different bets.

This is the core of what smart scratch-off play looks like. You're not predicting winners. You're identifying which games have jackpot odds that have shifted in your favor, and avoiding the ones where the odds have gotten worse. The information is out there. Most players just never look.

What to do: Before buying, check how many top prizes remain and how many tickets are still in circulation. When a game has most of its jackpots intact but a big chunk of tickets already sold, that's a game where the odds have moved in your direction. Tools like Savvy Scratch track this in real time and rate every game so you can spot these shifts at a glance.

5. Set a Budget and Treat It Like a Bankroll (Not a Spending Limit)

Every professional gambler operates with a bankroll. Not a "budget." The word matters. A budget feels like a restriction, something you're constantly trying to stay under. A bankroll is a strategic tool. It's the amount of capital you've allocated to play with, and managing it intelligently is what separates smart players from everyone else.

Here's how to think about it:

Decide what you're comfortable spending on scratch-offs per month. Let's say it's $100. That's your bankroll. Now the question isn't "how do I spend $100 on lottery tickets?" It's "how do I deploy $100 for the best possible return?"

With that frame, your decision-making changes completely. Instead of impulsively grabbing tickets at the counter, you're checking which games have the best remaining prize data. You're choosing one or two well-researched purchases over ten random ones. You're tracking what you spent and what you won. You're playing strategically instead of emotionally.

The players who consistently lose more than they should aren't always the unluckiest. They're the ones with no plan. They play too many games, chase losses by buying extra tickets after a losing streak, and make purchases based on emotion instead of information. When you treat your lottery spending like a bankroll, you force yourself into discipline. And discipline is where the edge lives.

There's one more benefit to the bankroll mindset: it makes you more selective. When every dollar counts, you stop wasting them on dead games or impulse purchases. You start checking the data first. You start being intentional. And intentional players, over time, get better results than impulsive ones.

What to do: Set a monthly number you're comfortable with. Write it down. Stick to it. Then focus all your energy on making those dollars count by applying the other four strategies in this post. A smaller bankroll deployed intelligently will outperform a bigger bankroll spent randomly every single time.

The Bottom Line

None of this guarantees you'll win. Anyone who promises that is lying to you, and there's no shortage of those people in the lottery space. What these five strategies do is shift the odds in your favor as much as the math allows. You're still playing a game where the house has an edge. But you're playing it smarter, with more information, and with the kind of disciplined approach that separates casual players from informed ones.

The biggest advantage available to any scratch-off player right now is simply checking the remaining prize data before buying. It's free information. Most state lottery websites publish it. And yet the vast majority of players never look. They're buying tickets to games where the jackpot is already sitting in someone else's bank account.

Don't be that player.

If you want this data organized, analyzed, and rated for every active game in your state, that's why I built Savvy Scratch. Real-time odds across 13 states. Every game rated Good, Neutral, or Bad. For less than the cost of a single scratch-off per month. Try it for 30 days, risk-free.

But even if you never use a tool, start checking the remaining prizes before your next purchase. That one habit puts you ahead of 95% of players immediately.

Doug is the founder of Savvy Scratch and a professional gambler with over $500,000 in lifetime winnings across poker, blackjack, and casino advantage play. He built Savvy Scratch to give scratch-off players access to the same kind of data-driven edge that professional gamblers use every day.