How Scratchstats ranks scratch-off games.
A short orientation followed by reference material. Covers the EV math, the state feeds we ingest, and the grading rubric.
Overview.
A short orientation. Read this first; the rest is reference.
ScratchStats pulls prize data from thirteen state lotteries, scores every active game against the same rubric, and ranks them on the Big Board so you can see at a glance which tickets are still paying and which have already been picked clean.
EV - worked example
We quote EV as a percent of ticket price: the expected payout per dollar spent, what the casino industry calls return to player (RTP). It's the sum of every prize tier's contribution to a single ticket's expected payout, divided by ticket price. Tap a tier in the table below and the formula on the right will update with that tier's exact numbers. The game shown is illustrative; every live game page runs the same formula on real counts.
- Winner counts are source data. Every per-tier total and remaining count comes straight from the state lottery's published table.
- The print run is published by most states. States marked Estimated in the coverage table below don't disclose it; for those we reconstruct it from the prize ladder and the overall odds, and flag it on every affected game page.
- Tickets sold is always inferred. No state publishes a running count of tickets sold, so we work backwards from the printed overall odds: a game with "1 in 4.25" odds sells about 4.25 tickets for every winner, so claimed winners × 4.25 ≈ tickets sold. This assumes winning tickets are evenly mixed through the print run.
- EV sparklines are clamped. The weekly samples behind the home-page EV sparklines are capped at 200% of ticket price so a single corrupted source row can't flatten the rest of the line. Headline EV numbers are computed from live counts and are never clamped.
Coverage by state.
Each state publishes on its own cadence. We poll every six hours and surface what we observe.
Grading rubric.
One letter per game. S is absolute: the remaining prize pool beats the ticket price. A, B, and C are relative: each graded game is ranked against the rest of its board, top quartile to bottom. Games whose state publishes too little prize data for a trustworthy EV go ungraded. (Detail pages still use an older fixed EV scale; we're unifying them with the board.)
The expected return per ticket exceeds its price. Almost always comes from an unclaimed top prize in a small remaining pool. These windows are rare and close quickly.
The highest expected returns among graded games on its board right now. The games we'd actually point at.
The middle of the pack. The default state for most games most of the time.
The weakest expected returns on the board right now. Either skip or wait for a reset.