Everyone wants to win some money just by scratching that magic paper and seeing some lucky combination or joyful message saying that you won a decent sum of money. But what’s your chance of seeing that desirable message?
In this article, we’ll explain to you everything about the odds of winning $500 on a scratch ticket in different places and countries. And we’ll also show you the common math you should know to calculate your risks in any gambling or lottery and to make a wise decision about whether you should spend your money and take that risk or not.
The odds of winning money in scratch tickets aren’t easy to count. We should give you some theory first. But we’ll make sure it won’t be that boring!
Scratch tickets – why are they still popular?
Some people just have that gambling bug inside that sometimes bites them and demands some money risk there and then. It’s not the unique feature of your personality – a lot of people have that. And this is actually the main reason why all those casinos, lotteries, and other gambling providers exist.
So, if you are bitten by this gambling bug in any place where gambling is forbidden, you should find the lottery stall and buy a ticket that you can immediately scratch and see if you won some money.
Scratch tickets have quite a lot of important features:
- they are quick – you just buy the ticket and scratch it to see if you are lucky;
- a lot of lotteries offer these tickets, and all of them are official and controlled by the government;
- the price of these tickets may be different, but it’s usually not that high;
- wins are pretty common even though they aren’t very big usually.
So, this is something like a substitution for real gambling when you don’t have a casino around you. In many countries, gambling is forbidden. But lotteries are legal almost everywhere. So, some people just don’t have any other choice but to buy the scratch ticket and scratch it eagerly to see if this is their lucky day.
These scratch cards have been here for over 50 years now, by the way. Yes, their popularity dimmed a little with the appearance of online casinos and other easily accessible gambling options. But still, many people love scratching those tickets.
What are your chances to win $500 in the scratch lottery?
Well, we should start with the simple thing: every lottery has its own RTP or Return To Player. This return rate is always different and depends on a lot of factors. But essentially, it’s the percentage of money that is returned to the player and is counted from all the money that the lottery gets for selling tickets.
RTP is the most important figure for any gambling or lottery. If you know the RTP, you can perfectly count up your chances. The problem is that the RTP is not always clearly given and even if given, it’s not always true.
But let’s imagine you know that the RTP in a scratch-ticket lottery is 80%. This is a solid rate, so 80% of the money from selling all the tickets is returned to players in form of wins. It means that if you buy tickets for $1000, you have a high chance of winning $800. Sounds not so good, right?
The problem with any lottery is that in the long run, it will always take your money. Players lose, lotteries win and this is the most important fact you should know about them.
But you may be lucky enough and get your wins sooner than the stats come into action. If you are lucky, you can win $500 in your first or second tickets. Then, you will have some profit.
Counting up the exact chance of winning $500
In a scratch lottery, you should know two things: RTP and the price of the ticket to count up your chances. So, let’s take the $10 ticket price for our example and 80% of RTP.
In this example, 1 ticket in every 62.5 tickets will be able to win $500. How did we get this figure? Here’s how:
- to win $500 in this lottery, you will need to buy tickets for $625 because the RTP is 80%, so $125 will be the revenue of the lottery operator;
- now you just need to divide $625 by $10 which is the price of the ticket in this lottery and you get 62.5 tickets;
- so, your chance of winning $500 in a scratch lottery with a ticket price of $10 is 1.54% which is not that good.
But in this example, we have a lot of figures that may change. For example, the price of the ticket may be $5, and in this case, you will have about a 0.77% chance to win $500 for every ticket you buy. Also, the RTP may change and it will affect the eventual result really much.
We’ve just counted up the ideal situation when we know the RTP and the ticket price is quite convenient to count. But you may not have all those data at first, so let’s see what else we know about the scratch-ticket lottery.
What’s the real RTP in lotteries with scratch tickets?
You may think that the chance of winning $500 in the scratch-ticket lottery of 1.54% is not that great. But things are much worse actually. We took 80% RTP which is ridiculously high for most lotteries in the world. On average, RTP in lotteries will change from 50% to 80% if those lotteries are controlled by the government and may be as low as 20-25% in those lotteries that are controlled purely by private businesses.
We believe that the average RTP of 60% is what you should take when you think about scratch-ticket lotteries and chances to win there. Of course, this is going to vary much depending on the country, state, company, lottery type, etc. But the average figure should be about 60%.
And with this, you can see that the chance of winning $500 in these lotteries sharply goes down. It’s only about 1% which is a miserable chance, really.
But we should also say that $500 is a lot for a scratch-ticket lottery. So if you take a smaller desired sum of money to win, your chances will get much higher.
How much can you win in a scratch-ticket lottery?
This depends much on the type of lottery you are playing. It may be the instant-win scratch-off where you just get a higher chance of winning a relatively small amount of money. Or it can be a jack-pot scratch-off where you target a big jackpot that can be 5000 or 7000 higher than the price of the ticket.
So, a $1 ticket can bring you up to $40-$50 of instant wins if it’s a non-jackpot lottery. But if it’s a jackpot lottery, it won’t give you a lot of instant wins. Instead, you will have a very tiny chance of winning a jackpot which can be $5,000 or $7,000.
Do we know people who won that much in these lotteries? No, we don’t, because they are ridiculously rare. But we are sure that some people did win this money because, in the US, these lotteries are strictly controlled by states and really pay off all wins. So, yes, you can win that much. But the chance of this happening is so low that it’s almost impossible.
Is there any winning strategy for scratch-off lotteries?
Unfortunately, all those “tips” and “hacks” you will find online don’t work with scratch-ticket lotteries. The main reason is that these lotteries are very random and don’t allow any strategies at all.
You can buy 50 tickets and all of them will be empty because you’ve chosen a jackpot lottery. But you may buy just one lucky ticket and win a huge jackpot for paying just a couple of dollars as the price of the lottery ticket.
You should understand that when you are playing scratch-offs, it’s more about your luck than the strategy you use. If you feel like buying a ticket today, just get one or two. But never lose more money than you can afford to lose. Buying tickets in bulk doesn’t bring you lots of money. Using this very common strategy you just get a higher chance to prove that RTP works – you will eventually win back about 60% of the money you spent on tickets.
Final words
Well, we’ve told you today about scratch-off tickets and how you can win money using them. At least, now you know that there are no strategies, and your chance of winning anything higher than $500 is too thin. You also know how to count your chance of winning a certain amount of money just by buying tickets one by one.
We hope you won’t let anyone fool you and won’t waste your money on something that gives you so little chance of winning.
