Check For This Red Flag Before Buying A Lottery Ticket

Lottery tickets and scratch card lottery offerings are an immensely visible part of modern life. Jackpot numbers are often posted up in huge font on billboards, and tickets and cards are prominently displayed in stores around the country. Roughly half the U.S. population participates in the Powerball lottery every year, every one of them with stars in their eyes thinking about what they do with the winnings if their number is called.

Whether in scratch cards or standard lottery tickets, however, there's a lot more to the conversation then just luck. Of course, luck plays a huge part in your potential to walk away with a payday of any size, but a few crucial elements of strategy are also baked into the experience. First of all, it's important to understand the odds of winning any particular lottery game. Just as you would in a casino or at the betting table, taking time to read about the odds of winning can save you a lot of heartache down the line. Checking on a few key pieces of information, including your odds, can help you avoid one particular red flag that can sink your chances of winning before they even get off the ground.

The odds of winning any particular lottery game are typically printed on the card or ticket itself. This gives players a relatively easy way to check. These lottery games are printed with bold imagery and bright colors, inviting buyers to stare at them while thinking about what they do with the jackpot cash. These cards are also prominently displayed just about anywhere they're sold, allowing you to get a really good look at the card you're thinking about purchasing before you pull out your wallet. Finding the odds printed on a card allows you to avoid options with a poor expected payout rate.

But scouring a card for this information isn't the only source that you should explore before playing the lottery. Checking the lottery page for your local community or state before even heading to the store to purchase a ticket or scratch card is a great way to avoid wasting your money on a loser. These sites offer information on the prize pool that remains unclaimed. It's worth noting that unclaimed and unpurchased aren't the same thing, so taking this information with a grain of salt is necessary. Major lottery winners sometimes delay claiming their prize (or even fail to claim it altogether), but this additional wrinkle can't be known by players hoping for their own slice of the prize. Information you do have available can alert you to a few key details. If the highest prize has already been claimed for a game, you'll need to look at what's leftover and decide if that's worth your money, hope, and whatever luck you might have. You may be better off opting for a different game.

It's also worth keeping in mind that the least expensive tickets and scratch cards are priced this way for a reason. When checking on the odds of winning across a few different available games, it should come as no surprise that the more expensive tickets offer better odds as well as higher top prize figures in many instances. Frequent lottery players will typically all have their own personal quirks, strategies, and approaches. However, most agree that's skipping the cheapest lottery games available is in the player's best interest.

Dirt cheap cards aren't worth your while, but that doesn't mean that all lottery games are a waste. Instead, if you plan to dedicate $10 to scratch card purchases, buy a single $10 card instead of 10 $1 cards. The odds of winning anything will be better, and the potential for higher prize values is also baked into the more expensive game. Yet another strategy that scratch card and other lottery players sometimes focus on involves buying in bulk. The thought is that random prize allocation may result in an increase in odds across cards in series. If one card doesn't yield any prize money, the next one may be more likely to offer up the goods. Therefore, holding onto your cash so that you can buy multiple cards at the same time rather than single cards across different days or weeks may be a useful strategy to further increase your odds of winning. You might even try the Singleton method, a means of trying to gain information from the numbers printed visibly on cards' faces.