The REAL Truth About Scratchies

We uncover the blatant truth about scratch card games.

They print a certain number of tickets, of which a small number of them are winners. As to the distribution of the winning tickets in the pack, that’s determined by a random number generator at the time of the printing subject to contractual requirements such as the minimal dollar value of prizes in a pack. The identity of the packs are obscured and the packs are mechanically shuffled before shipping. Once shipped to the store, the pack is activated in that the pack number is revealed and scanned in so the lottery commission knows where it is and that it hasn’t been misappropriated or lost.

The scratching is just a reveal, all the alleged ways of winning are just different ways of saying whether or not the ticket is a winning ticket. You might as well just scratch off the 2d barcode and scan that to see if it won anything rather than play the scratch off “games” but that’s far less satisfying.

The scratch-offs return more of the money back in prizes, a $20 per ticket scratchoff game will typically have it’s prize structure such that 75 cents of every dollar spent in the game is returned as prizes whereas with a jackpot draw game, it can be as low as 17 cents per dollar though it goes up with the rollovers. Note that the slot machines in Vegas payback 92 cents to 98 cents on the dollar so in theory you’re far better off with a slot machine but you’ll still be losing money.