Part 2. Save your losing tickets. Many places will run second-chance lottos, in which you can send in the old tickets from particular games for a drawing. Keep old tickets organized by game in an envelope, and go through it for second-chance opportunities when they're announced. Send them in and hope for the best. That losing ticket might still win you money. Sometimes, the lottery commission will advertise these second-chance drawings when the top prizes have already been paid out, to try to drive the sales of essentially useless tickets.

Buying tickets that will surely be losers just to have the second-chance opportunity isn't a great idea. Only use it for tickets you've already bought. Don't play a game just because it will be collected as a second-chance lotto ticket later.

Turn in all losing tickets. After you collect a few winners and want to turn them back in to collect your winnings, bring back your losing tickets too. Always have the computer at the retailer check the winnings to make sure you haven't missed anything.

In games where there are several different ways to win prizes, it can be easy to overlook winnings. Having the computer check will ensure you don't accidentally throw away any winnings. If you want to save tickets for second-chance opportunities, ask for them back and save them somewhere safe until the second-chance lotto is announced. Avoid "Mystery Packs" or any other package promotions.

Another technique some retailers use to repackage and clear out old stock is discounting ticket packages, made up of games in which the top winners have already been paid out. While it may seem like you're getting a deal, understand that the probabilities of a given ticket being a winner are completely skewed when the top prizes have already been claimed.

It's better to focus on active games in which the numbers are more friendly and you actually stand the chance to win some real money. Examine the tickets before you play them. One Canadian professor was able to "plunder" tic-tac-toe scratch-offs by noticing a recurring pattern printed on winning tickets [4] X Research source. If the printing on the outside of a scratch-off varies from card to card, pay attention to it. The "singleton method" involves looking at the grid of printed numbers immediately to the left of a tic-tac-toe style scratch-off game, and analyzing the each matrix for patterns.

Most states in which this manufacturing abnormality occurred have corrected the issue. Since most retailers and machines don't let you examine the tickets before you've purchased them, it's difficult to say there's much practical application of this skill, though it's still worth examining the ticket for any signs of tampering, or any patterns you might pick up on later and find your own manufacturing error. Part 3. Set a scratch-off budget and stick with it.

Decide how much you can afford to spend on a scratch-offs every week. This absolutely has to be money you can afford to lose, because you will lose money playing the lottery longterm. It's a guarantee. When you've set a weekly budget , take money for scratch-offs from the leftover cash, not used for rent, groceries, or other necessary expenses. If you've got a fund set aside for fun stuff, you could take it out of there if you enjoy playing scratch-offs.

Never spend more than your budget. Resist the temptation to chase your losses. The statistics won't change in your favor. Pick a game you like and stick with it until the prizes are paid out. Lotto tickets may award consistency in the long run. Keep playing the game at your price point with the odds you like, until the top prize is paid out, then switch to another game.

This helps to manage the psychological impact of winning and losing. Make it a rule: you can't play another game. Some serious players differ on their philosophy regarding this. Alternatively, you could pick a store to always buy from, and buy different sorts of games from that store. Make one part of your buying routine consistent.

Since there's always a higher-percentage chance of losing over winning, regardless of what you do, playing consistent is just one way of staying sane. If you win on a ticket, put the money in your wallet and leave the store.

This alone will increase your income from scratch off wins, as using the winnings to invest in more money will most likely cause you to just lose them again. The numbers aren't your friend in the long-term. Typically your state lottery will have a web page you can look to see how many of a given ticket were printed, this is a good thing to check to see if the big winners of any given scratch off are already won. Not Helpful 29 Helpful Buy the ones with the best odds and the ones that have not paid out their large prizes.

Check your state's lottery website to find the games that have the most prizes currently available. Not Helpful 17 Helpful They are the codes for the tickets. Not Helpful 38 Helpful First, read the instructions on the ticket to see how you win. Scratch the ticket and then check it over yourself. You don't have to even scratch the ticket to see if you won. The lotteries have scanners at retailers for you to check yourself.

You can also give the ticket to the cashier to scan for you. Be aware that some cashiers may lie to you and say it didn't win. Make sure you get a copy of the receipt the lottery machine prints out to verify it for yourself. Most cashiers are honest though. If any of the singletons appear in a tic-tac-toe then the ticket is almost certainly a winner: The numbers in these cells will appear under the latex coating at the left side of the ticket.

Keep the ticket. Scratch off the latex. You've got a winner! Not surprisingly, after Srivastava alerted the Ontario Lottery to his technique, the game was pulled from stores. The official explanation from the Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corporation is that the tic-tac-toe game suffered from a "design flaw.

The story of the broken game got little public attention. It was, however, cited in a investigative report by the Ontario ombudsman, who was investigating retailer fraud. Srivastava, meanwhile, was becoming even more interested in scratch tickets. What were the odds that I just happened to stumble upon the only breakable game the very first time I played the lottery? Of course, I knew it was possible that every other scratch game was totally secure.

I just didn't think it was very likely. He began by looking at other tic-tac-toe games in the US and Canada. Srivastava soon discovered that it wasn't just an Ontario problem. At the time, one of his best friends was living in Colorado, and Srivastava asked him to send along a few tickets.

It turned out that the same singleton trick also worked on the Colorado game, albeit with only a 70 percent level of accuracy. Colorado Lottery officials did not respond to repeated requests for comment. Srivastava was even able to break a Super Bingo game sold in Ontario in , which also featured an elaborate baited hook. In this case, he says he could sort winners from losers with a 70 percent success rate. The Ontario Lottery says the Super Bingo game didn't have the same flaw as the tic-tac-toe game but that it was pulled off the Ontario market in March as a precaution.

In North America, the vast majority of lottery tickets—everything from daily draw Pick 4-style games to small-stakes tic-tac-toe and bingo scratchers—are produced by a handful of companies like Scientific Games , Gtech Printing , and Pollard Banknote. These publicly traded firms oversee much of the development, algorithm design, and production of the different gambling games, and the state lotteries are largely dependent on their expertise. Ross Dalton is president of Gtech Printing, and he acknowledges that the "breakability" of tickets is a constant concern.

Several other printing companies declined to comment. Previous forensic hacks have included vodka, which swelled the hidden ink, and the careful use of X-Acto knives.

The printers have also become concerned about the barcodes on the tickets, since the data often contains information about payouts. While the printers insist that all of their tickets are secure—"We've learned from our past security breaches," Dalton says—there is suggestive evidence that some state lotteries have been gamed. Consider payout statistics from Washington and Virginia, which Srivastava calculated.

Many lotteries disclose claimed prizes on their websites. In both states, certain scratch games generated payout anomalies that should be extremely rare.

The anomalies are always the same: Break-even tickets—where the payout is equal to the cost—are significantly underredeemed while certain types of winning tickets are vastly overredeemed.

In fact, the majority of scratch games with baited hooks in Washington and Virginia displayed this same irregularity. It's as if people had a knack for buying only tickets that paid out more than they cost.

According to Srivastava, that could well be what's happening. The state lotteries insist that people simply forget to redeem break-even tickets, although it remains unclear why only some games show the anomaly. They're a waste of time. Instead, you'd want to buy only the tickets that made money. If there were people doing this, if there were people who could sort the winners from the losers, then what you'd see on the payout statistics is exactly what we see. This is what a plundered game looks like.

I then ask Srivastava how a criminal organization might plunder the lottery. He lays out a surprisingly practical plan for what he would do: "At first glance, the whole problem with plundering is one of scale," he says. So I'd probably want to invent some sort of scanning device that could quickly sort the tickets for me.

But that may not be an insurmountable problem. He asked several Toronto retailers if they would object to him buying tickets and then exchanging the unused, unscratched tickets. Nobody was even a tiny bit suspicious," he says. Because they all assumed the games are unbreakable. So what I would try to do is buy up lots of tickets, run them through my scanning machine, and then try to return the unscratched losers.

Of course, you could also just find a retailer willing to cooperate or take a bribe. That might be easier. A potential plunderer would need to sort through these tickets and selectively pick the winners. The losers would be sold to unwitting customers—or returned to the lottery after the game was taken off the market.

At the moment, Srivastava's suspicions remain entirely hypothetical; there is no direct evidence that anybody has plundered a game. Nevertheless, there's a disturbing body of anecdotal evidence in addition to those anomalous statistics that suggests that the games aren't perfect. Consider a series of reports by the Massachusetts state auditor. The report does not provide the name of the lucky winner. The auditor attributed the high number of payouts going to single individuals to professional cashers.

These cashers turn in others' winning tickets—they are paid a small percentage—so the real winners can avoid taxes. But if those cashers were getting prepicked winners, that could be hard to uncover.

Furthermore, the Massachusetts lottery has a history of dispensing large payouts to suspected criminals, at least in one Mass Millions game. At the time, authorities thought Bulger was using the lottery to launder money: take illicit profits, buy a share in a winning lottery ticket, redeem it, and end up with clean cash. In this respect, the lottery system seems purpose-built for organized crime, says Michael Plichta, unit chief of the FBI's organized crime section.

That's when I began to realize that they were using the games to launder cash. The problem for the criminals, of course, is that unless cracked, most lotteries return only about 53 cents on the dollar, which means that they'd be forfeiting a significant share of their earnings.

But what if criminals aren't playing the lottery straight? What if they have a method that, like Srivastava's frequency-of-occurrence trick, can dramatically increase the odds of winning? As Srivastava notes, if organized crime had a system that could identify winning tickets more than 65 percent of the time, then the state-run lottery could be turned into a profitable form of money laundering. But the circumstantial evidence, as noted by the FBI, is certainly troubling.

She bought two of the winners from the same store in Bishop, Texas. Looking to place a sports bet online? The overall odds of winning any prize on an instant ticket varies, and is approximately 1 in 3. This means that for all the tickets sold for a given game, approximately one third will be winners.

This does not necessarily mean that if you buy three tickets, the third will win. For example: If there are 21,, tickets printed and 6,, prizes available for one game of Instant Crossword, the overall odds of winning would be 1 in 3. As tickets are sold, the odds of some prizes change as purchased tickets are removed from the pool of available tickets. To help players make informed decisions about ticket purchases, OLG publishes the number of claimed and unclaimed prizes for each individual ticket.

Track your prizes. Overall odds are printed on every instant ticket. To find the complete prize structure and odds of winning individual prizes, check at OLG.