Which Scratch-Offs Still Have Top Prizes? That's the Running Count. Here's the True Count.

By Doug Moeller | Professional Gambler & Founder of Savvy Scratch

Two $20 scratch-offs are hanging next to each other at the same gas station. Pull up the state lottery's prize page and both show exactly one top prize still unclaimed. By the question most careful players ask, which scratch-offs still have top prizes, they're tied. Both pass.

They are not tied. Depending on how many unsold tickets are sitting behind that one prize, one of those games can put you several times closer to the jackpot than the other. The number of top prizes remaining is the first thing you should check. It is not the thing that decides the buy.

I've spent more than fifteen years gambling for a living, mostly poker and blackjack card counting with a run of casino advantage play mixed in, and I'm north of $500K in lifetime winnings. None of that came from the first number I looked at. It came from knowing which number actually decides the bet. Here's how that works on a scratch-off rack.

Want to see which games in your state still have their top prizes right now? Create a free Savvy Scratch account with no credit card and the Bad and New tabs are yours at no cost. Full Good and Neutral rankings are $5 a month or $50 a year with a 30-day worry-free guarantee. Start free at savvyscratch.com.

Which scratch-offs still have top prizes? Always start there

Asking this question already puts you ahead of most people at the counter. The typical buyer picks by artwork, by price, or by whichever game the clerk says just hit. The top prize count cuts through all of that with one hard fact. If every advertised top prize has been claimed, the headline you're paying for doesn't exist anymore.

The lottery will keep selling that game anyway. Nobody puts a sticker on the dispenser when the last jackpot gets cashed. The art stays bright, the price stays the same, and the odds on the back stay frozen at launch-day numbers. I walked through why that's completely legal, and why the state is betting you won't look, in the biggest lie in scratch-offs.

So the first filter is simple. If the top prize is why you're buying, games with zero left are out. No exceptions for the game you like, the game that paid you once, or the game with the great artwork.

But passing that filter only tells you a game isn't dead. It doesn't tell you it's good.

Top prizes remaining is the running count

When I counted cards, the number I tracked hand to hand was the running count. Every low card that came out pushed it up, every high card pushed it down. New counters fall in love with that number, and it's a mistake that costs real money. A running count of plus six means one thing with five decks left in the shoe and something completely different with one deck left. Spread across five decks, those extra high cards barely move the math. Packed into one deck, they're a genuine edge. So every serious counter converts the running count into the true count by dividing it by the decks remaining, and the true count is the only number you size a bet off. Same plus six, two very different decisions.

"Top prizes remaining" is a running count. It's a raw number with no context. One top prize left means very little until you know how many unsold tickets it's buried in. The true count for a scratch-off is top prizes remaining measured against tickets remaining, and that's the number that tells you how close you actually are.

Here's what that looks like with two made-up $20 games. The numbers are round on purpose, just to show the mechanics.

Game A launched with six top prizes in a 20 million ticket print run. Three are still unclaimed, and about 9 million tickets are still unsold. That works out to roughly one top prize for every 3 million tickets left.

Game B launched with four top prizes in a 16 million ticket print run. Only one is still unclaimed, but it's sitting in the last 800,000 unsold tickets. That's one top prize for every 800,000 tickets.

Game A has three times as many top prizes left. Game B gives you the far better shot at one, close to four times better per ticket. A player who stops at "which scratch-offs still have top prizes" picks A, because three beats one. A player who reads the true count picks B. I've described this before as the length of the road between you and a top prize. The true count is how you measure that road.

Compare today's odds to the odds the game launched with

The other half of the true count is direction. Has this game gotten better or worse since it hit the shelf?

Game B launched at one top prize per 4 million tickets. It's now at one per 800,000. That's five times better than the odds printed on the ticket, because the tickets sold faster than the top prizes got claimed. Game A launched at about one per 3.3 million and sits near one per 3 million today, so it's playing almost exactly as advertised.

This is the comparison the ticket itself can never show you. The printed odds are a snapshot from the day the game went to press, and they never update. The current odds move every time a top prize is claimed and every time a chunk of tickets sells without one, which is why scratch-off odds change whether anyone at the counter notices or not.

You can run this yourself with three numbers from your state lottery's prize page: top prizes printed, top prizes still unclaimed, and tickets still unsold. Divide tickets unsold by top prizes unclaimed and you have the current odds on the top prize. Put that next to the launch odds. If today's "1 in" number is smaller than it was at launch, the game has improved. If it's bigger, the game has been picked over. One honest warning: tickets unsold is usually an estimate. Not every state publishes sales directly, so treat that figure as close rather than exact.

A top prize left doesn't mean you're drawing live

Poker has two phrases for this. Drawing dead means no card left in the deck can win you the hand. Drawing thin means you still have outs, just not many. I've been on both ends of drawing thin more times than I can count, and the lesson it teaches is that "I can still win this" and "I should put money in" are two completely different sentences. Plenty of players go broke on hands that were never dead, only thin, because technically alive felt like good enough.

A scratch-off with one top prize left in several million unsold tickets isn't drawing dead. It's drawing thin. The top-prize filter lets it through, and that's exactly the trap. Alive is the floor, not the standard.

There's a second kind of thin, and it cuts against Game B from earlier. A game with one top prize left is one claim away from dead. If someone cashes that prize tomorrow, the game you checked this morning is a jackpot-free husk, and the rack looks exactly the same as it did before. Game A, with three left, can absorb a claim and still be in play. That doesn't flip the math. Game B's current odds are still far better. What it changes is your habit. A game down to its last top prize has to be re-checked right before every purchase, because that read goes stale the moment the prize is claimed.

Doing that division for every game in your state takes an evening with a spreadsheet. Savvy Scratch does it every day for every active game across more than two dozen states and shows launch odds next to current odds, tier by tier. The Bad and New tabs are free with no card. Good and Neutral rankings are $5 a month or $50 a year with a 30-day worry-free guarantee. Try it free.

Read the top three or four prize tiers, not just the jackpot row

The top prize gets the headline, but it's rarely the only prize a player would be thrilled to hit. On most games the second and third tiers are serious money too, and they follow the exact same math. Run the same true count on each one: prizes left in that tier against tickets left in the game.

This matters because tiers don't move together. A game can be in great shape on the jackpot row while its second and third tiers have been cleaned out, or the other way around. In the Savvy Scratch detail view, that shows up as a mix of green and red in the top rows. Mostly green through the top three or four tiers means the unsold tickets hold more of the prizes you actually want than the printed odds suggest. Green on the jackpot and red right underneath means you're making a narrower bet than it looks, and you should be honest with yourself that the jackpot alone is what you're buying.

What you can mostly ignore for this decision is the overall "1 in 3.5" printed on the back. That number counts every prize in the game, including the ones that just hand your ticket price back. It tells you almost nothing about your shot at a prize that changes anything.

What doesn't belong in the decision

Once you have the count, a few things deserve zero weight, no matter how loud they are in your head. No game is due, because the top prizes were placed at the print plant, not handed out on a schedule. A game that just paid a top prize is not hot. It's weaker, since its true count just dropped. And a game that feels cold only deserves a look if the data shows tickets selling while the top prizes stayed put, which is something you read off the prize page, not something you feel at the counter.

These are the same mental shortcuts I broke down in the hidden mistakes most lottery players don't realize they're making. The fix for all of them is identical. Check the count and let it overrule the story.

The 60-second check before your next purchase

Start by dropping every game at your price point that has zero top prizes left, assuming the top prize is why you're playing. For whatever survives, compare top prizes remaining against tickets remaining. That's the true count, and when it disagrees with the raw number of top prizes, the true count wins.

Then check direction. Current top-prize odds better than launch means the game deserves your attention. Worse than launch means it's been picked over. After that, read the next two or three tiers down so you know whether the game is strong at the top or only strong at the very top. And if your pick is down to its last top prize, check it again right before you pay.

That's jackpot hunting done properly, the same idea behind finding the big prizes still out there, with the true count doing the heavy lifting. If you'd rather not run the numbers by hand, the national scratch-off board shows every state we cover along with today's top-rated game in each, one click from the full ranked list. If any number on a game page is unfamiliar, the scratch-off odds guide explains what each one means.

None of this turns a scratch-off into a winning bet. The state keeps its cut on every ticket, and nobody can tell you which ticket wins. What the count does is make sure the money you were already going to spend goes into the game with the shortest road to the prize you're actually buying it for.

Frequently asked questions

How do I find out which scratch-offs still have top prizes? Every state lottery publishes prize data for its active games, usually on a page listing prizes remaining at each tier. Check the top-prize row for every game at your price point. Savvy Scratch pulls that same official data daily and ranks every active game so you don't have to open each page one at a time.

Is a scratch-off with no top prizes left still worth buying? If the top prize is your reason for playing, no. The smaller prizes still pay out, but the prize the ticket advertises is gone, and the state has no obligation to pull the game until it decides to close it.

Does a game with more top prizes left have better odds? Not necessarily. What matters is top prizes left compared to tickets left. A game with one top prize in a small pile of unsold tickets can have far better current odds than a game with three top prizes spread across millions of tickets.

Do scratch-off odds get better as tickets sell? They can. If tickets sell while the top prizes stay unclaimed, the current odds on those prizes improve past what the back of the ticket says. If the top prizes get claimed early, the odds get worse. The printed odds never change either way.

Can Savvy Scratch tell me which ticket will win? No, and don't trust anyone who says they can. Scratch-offs are randomly distributed. Savvy Scratch shows you which games still have their top prizes and how current odds compare to launch, so you stop paying full price for games that have been picked clean.

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 count-the-shoe discipline that works at blackjack tables to scratch-off lottery tickets. Follow Doug on X | YouTube

Check the true count before your next trip to the counter. Open Savvy Scratch, pick your state, and see which games still have their top prizes and which ones are only pretending. Free account to start, no card required. Full rankings are $5 a month or $50 a year with a 30-day worry-free guarantee. Get started at savvyscratch.com

Savvy Scratch is an independent analysis tool and is not affiliated with any state lottery. No analysis can guarantee a winning ticket. Set a budget, never chase losses, and play only with money you can afford to lose. If gambling stops being fun, call 1-800-GAMBLER.