Jul 13, 2007 12:03 am US/Eastern
How To Get A Winning Scratch Ticket - Every Time
The Catch: Profit Not Guaranteed
by Paula Ebben
(WBZ)
What if we told you there's a way to guarantee you'll buy a winning Lottery ticket?
You'd probably say, "Impossible."
But there is, playing the popular scratch tickets.
According to the Lottery Commission, for $1, $2 and $5 instant games there will be no more than 15 consecutive losing tickets in a string of tickets.
So if you buy 16 consecutive cards, you'll have at least one winning ticket. For the $10 games you'd need to buy 13 tickets.
"I've done it before," one Lottery player said. "There's definitely one or two dollars in there on a string, if not more."
To find out for ourselves, we took a couple of hundred dollars in cash to Kiki's Kwik Mart in Brighton.
We bought strings of $1, $2 and $10 tickets. Grand total: $226. Let the scratching begin!
It worked. In each string there was at least one winning ticket. But did we make money?
Not on the $1 and $2 strings. We spent $96 on those but won only $15.
But on the $10 tickets we spent $130 and came away with $255.
So what gives? The Lottery says the games are set up this way to ensure that each player has an equal chance of winning a prize, but says this will not help you beat the odds.
"The Lottery Commission understands the mathematics very well," said Prof. Tom Sherman, a Northeastern University mathematician.
Sherman said even though the math is important, it's really marketing at work here.
"You have to give people who are going to play the game a certain amount of winning," he said. "If you don't do that, they'll stop playing the game."
So even though knowing how these games work will give you a winning ticket, it doesn't guarantee you'll end up with a profit.
No one from the Lottery would appear on camera for this story. But they sent us a statement saying "as far as a formula for success, we'll leave that up to our players."
(© MMVII, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.)
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