How we rank scratch-offs
Everything on this site comes from the two numbers your state lottery publishes for every prize level: the printed odds ("1 in 300 tickets wins this") and how many of those prizes are left out of the total printed. That's it — no secret data, no gut feelings, no hunches. We just do the arithmetic, fresh every morning.
Step 1 — how many tickets exist
If a prize level has 1,000 prizes at 1-in-300 odds, about 300,000 tickets were printed (1,000 × 300). We run that math on every level of a game and take the middle answer, so rounding in any one row doesn't throw us off.
Step 2 — how many are sold
Levels with thousands of small prizes act like a random sample of all the tickets in a game. If 40% of the $10 prizes are still unclaimed, roughly 40% of the tickets are still on shelves. We never judge sales by the big prizes: five top prizes can't tell you anything about millions of tickets.
Step 3 — money back per $1
Prize money still unclaimed ÷ tickets we estimate are still unsold ÷ ticket price. It always comes out under $1 — the lottery keeps the difference. That's why we'll never tell you a ticket helps you "win more"; we tell you which ones waste less.
Hot and cold — carefully
If winning tickets are spread evenly through the print run, you can compute how many top prizes should be left at any sales level. "3 of 5 left with 62% sold" is exactly normal: pure chance. "All 6 still left at half sold" is genuinely unusual — that's when we call a game hot, and we only say it when the statistics clear a real bar. One big caveat: states post prize claims days to weeks late, so a game that looks hot today may already have been hit.
The fine print on giant prizes
When a top prize is paid out over 25 years instead of cash up front, we count it at about 60% of the advertised amount. $5 million spread over decades is simply not $5 million today, and we won't rank it as if it were.
What nobody can know
Nobody — not us, not the clerk, not a $99 "system" — can tell you which ticket in the roll wins. Winning tickets are shuffled through the print run precisely so no public information can point to them. Everything on this site is an estimate of what's left in each game; nothing is a prediction about your next ticket.
Where the data comes from
- California — every morning we crawl the California Lottery's Scratchers® game pages (calottery.com), which list full prize tables: printed odds and remaining-of-total for every level.
- Texas — texaslottery.com publishes full prize tables (printed vs. claimed) and even states the exact number of tickets printed per game: the least guesswork of any state we cover.
- New York — the state's official open-data API (data.ny.gov, the daily prize status report) for prizes remaining, plus nylottery.ny.gov for prices and odds. New York publishes only each game's overall odds, so per-level odds are worked out from the published totals. Every input is official; nothing is invented.
Corrections
Nobody pays to be ranked, and no lottery has any say in what appears here. If a number doesn't match your state lottery's own page, that's our bug — tell us and we'll fix it fast.