I normally don’t consider myself a jealous person but that all goes out the window when we’re talking about stories concerning people who’ve won the lottery.

Odds; $500: 1 in 84,000: $250: 1 in 84,000: $100: 1 in 11,052.63: $50: 1 in 3,387.1: $20: 1 in 1,400: $15: 1 in 893.62: $10: 1 in 100: $5: 1 in 300: $4: 1 in 60: $3: 1 in 13.64: $2: 1 in 9.38: Odds of winning any EZMatch prize are 1 in 4.71.

Back when I was in college, I won $50 on a $2 scratch-off and proceeded to eat and drink like a king—and by that I mean I bought two pizzas that would end up sustaining me for a week and consumed a 30 and a plastic handle of vodka in what was retroactively a problematic amount of time.

I’ve since come to terms with the fact that that’s probably going to be the pinnacle of my gambling career, and while I always pick up a couple of Powerball tickets when the jackpot joins the Tres Commas Club, I know there’s virtually no chance I’ll ever have the luck of the husband and wife who won millions within a few months of each other or the guy who won twice in five years.

However, there are plenty of people out there who subscribe to the “somebody’s gotta win” mentality, and if you count yourself among them, you might be interested in the question that brought you here.

Which States Have The Best Lottery Odds?

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1. You may already know that the chances of winning the Lotto jackpot are roughly 1 in 3.5 million, or that the overall chances of winning any prize in the Lotto game are about 1 in 20. But many people wonder how those chances of winning are determined. Lotto is played by selecting six numbers out of 44 possible choices (the numbers from 1 to 44).
2. The odds of winning in draw-based lottery games are based on two factors: 1. How many numbers must be matched. The size of the number pool. For example: For LOTTO 6/49, the odds of winning the jackpot are based on matching 6 numbers out of a number pool of 49 numbers. The more numbers there are to match, and the more numbers in the overall pool of numbers, the greater the odds.
3. This means that you have quite good odds of winning a prize if you have opted for a Pick 1 (1 in 10) which will result in a £10 prize and a pick 5 gives you a 1 in 2,118,760 chance at the £1,000,000 prize! What are the odds of winning Lotto? In addition to EuroMillions, the other major lottery we get asked about a lot is Lotto. Drawn every Saturday and Wednesday the UK Lotto requires you to successfully.
4. Still, many people prefer to try for one of lotteries like the Spanish Lottery, which has the biggest prize pool of any lottery as well as great chances of winning a prize. The absolute best any-prize odds of any of our lotteries is the French lotto, with any-prize odds of 6:1. In second place we have Austrian Lotto, another popular choice due.

As you probably know, not all lotteries are created equal but they largely follow the same rule: the lower the chance of winning, the higher the reward.

The nation’s two most popular lottery games are the aforementioned Powerball and its younger cousin Mega Millions, which both offer astronomically high odds: you have a 1 in 292,201,338 chance of winning the former and a 1 in 302,575,350 chance of taking home the latter’s jackpot

If you’re looking to deny the existence of the gambler’s fallacy, you might like to know Pennsylvania and Indiana sport a disproportionate number of winners on a national scale when it comes to Powerball while Georgia and New York are the “luckiest” states for Mega Millions.

With that said, if you’re hoping to increase your chances of winning from “virtually impossible” to “laughably improbable,” then state lotteries are the way to go. However, not all of them are created equal and there’s no real way to point to one specific game that outshines the rest.

With that said, I’ll do my best.

All but six states have their own lottery system in place—you might be shocked to know Utah is one of them (and unironically shocked that Nevada is also part of the club)—and if NBC is to be believed, Massachusetts is far and away the best state to play the lottery based on how much it pays out compared to the amount of money it generates.

However, it’s worth noting that data may be a bit flawed—in 2012, students at MIT figured out a way to cheat the system to the tune of $8 million and another couple managed to rake in $27 million over a ten-year span. If you take Massachusetts out of the running, then Arkansas takes the top spot followed by South Carolina, Minnesota, and Georgia (if you’re curious, West Virginia is the worst place to play).

If we’re being honest with each other, at the end of the day, the real answer to the question posed here is “Who the hell cares?” based on how slim your chances of winning are regardless of where you play.

With that said, I wish you the best of luck because you’re sure as hell going to need it.

When people ask “What are the Best Lottery Scratch off Odds?”, they usually are referring to the overall game odds. These are the printed odds on the back of instant scratch games. You might see something like “Overall Odds of Winning are 1 in 4.05”.

These are the the odds of winning any prize, including prizes that are equal to the price of the ticket.

One of our most popular scratcher strategies is our ranking of the best Overall Odds (available free to all our members) where players can instantly compare the overall odds for each game.

However, we are here to caution you that overall odds may not be the same as the best odds of winning. How so?

Which Lotto Has The Best Odds Of Winning

State lotteries can manipulate the overall odds to make them appear among the best when in reality, the individual prize odds might be among the worst.

Let’s dive in and see an example firsthand.

How is Overall Odds Calculated?

We need to take a step back and first see how does a state lottery calculate the overall odds of winning.

For every scratch game, the state lottery will determine the prize levels (e.g. $5, $10, $100, etc.) and the total number of prizes that will be made available. For our example, I’ve pulled an actual prize chart from a state lottery website.

As we can see, there are 12 different prize levels with a total of 2,395,512 prizes available. The lottery already tells us the overall odds of winning this game are 1 in 4.12, as show below.

The lottery calculated the “1 in 4.12” overall odds by dividing the total number of tickets printed by the total number of prizes available (2,395,512).

But we don’t know how many tickets were printed.

That’s right. The number of tickets printed isn’t disclosed, BUT we can figure it out by multiplying our total number of prizes (2,395,512) by the overall odds (4.12).

The result is approximately 9,900,000 tickets printed. Note we rounded the ticket count as it’s a rough estimate but close enough.

How about Prize Odds?

Now that we have the overall odds calculation out of the way, let’s dive a little deeper and see how the odds of each prize is calculated.

In our same game example, we see that the $500 prize will have 1,247 prizes available at the start of the game. Remember, the lottery has determined they are going to print 9,900,000 tickets so among all those tickets, there will 1,247 $500 winners.

To calculate the odds for our $500 prize, we simply divide the 9,900,000 printed tickets by the 1,247 prizes and learn the odds of winning the $500 prize are 1 in 7,915.

Pretty easy, right? Here’s what all the original prize odds look like.

Now that we know how the lottery calculates the odds, why shouldn’t we use the overall odds to figure out the best scratch off odds? Can’t we just see which game has the best overall odds and play that one?

Which Lotto Has Best Odds Of Winning

Unfortunately not. Keep reading and let me show you a couple reasons why you shouldn’t rely only on the overall odds.

Is Winning Really Winning?

First, most players would agree that just getting their money back on a scratch ticket isn’t actually winning. “Winning” the price of the ticket back gives the illusion of winning and keep players coming back but it’s really just breaking even.

Let’s take a look at our same example from above and recalculate the odds of winning a prize more than the ticket price. You know, actually “winning”.

In this example, we want to know what are the real odds of winning any prize GREATER than $5, the price of our example ticket.

To do that, we’ll sum up the total number of prizes again but this time exclude all those breakeven $5 prizes.

With the $5 prizes removed, we now see there are really 1,407,930 actual winning prizes.

Using our math skills from above, we find that the actual winning odds, or as we call them Adjusted Odds, is really 1 in 7.01 tickets is a winner. That is 9,900,000 tickets divided by 1,407,930 total prizes.

The overall odds just change by OVER 70%!

Now some players may not care as getting their money back is winning in their mind. But let’s dive just a little deeper.

The Best Odds Illusion

I’ve just shown you that all those breakeven prizes aren’t really winning prizes but are there to make the overall odds seem better. Let’s go a step further and say a lottery wanted to really manipulate a scratch game to look better than it really is.

Below is our original prize table from the example above, but I made 2 simple changes. I lowered the $250,000 top prize from 5 prizes down to just 1 and I lowered the second top prize, $10,000, from 24 prizes down to 2.

The change looks simple enough, the total prize count change is barely, if at all noticeable. The total number of prizes only went down by 26 prizes. However, let’s check out our prize odds.

We now see a HUGE change as the top prize odds went from 1 in 1,973,902 to now 1 in 9,869,509. A whopping 5x increase in odds!

The same thing for the $10,000 second place prize. We altered the count down to 2 prizes, which changed the odds from 1 in 411,230 to 1 in 4,934,755. This was a 12x increase in odds!

But here is the very sneaky part. Did you notice the overall odds?

The 1 in 4.12 overall odds never changed.

In both cases the lottery has two tickets with the same overall odds. If you had a choice though, which one would you choose?

For the curious, where did that extra prize money go? Remember, we took away 4 prizes of $250,000 and another 22 prizes of $10,000. You guessed it, pure lottery profit.

See, in our first example the total prize pool at the start of the game was $34,077,430, which represented an overall payout to players of 69.06%.

However, in our revised numbers, the prize pool dropped $1,230,000 to a total prize pool of $32,847,430, which is now only a payout of 66.58%.

The overall odds stayed the same but the lottery is keeping an extra $1,230,000 in profit instead of paying it to players.

Bringing it All Together

Let me show you one last example that brings both our points together. Let’s start with our original prize table again.

Now I’m going to reduce those top 2 prizes again like above BUT I’m also going to add some $5 prizes back. Let’s add 100,000 of the $5 prizes.

The lottery is still keeping a nice bonus profit by removing most of the top prizes but did shift a small piece of that money back to $5 prizes.

Here’s what our new prize table looks like

After taking out the top prizes and adding 100,000 small $5 prizes, we have a total prize count of 2,495,486. And now the magic.

Let’s divide the same ticket count by the new prize count. For those keeping track, that is 9,900,000 tickets divided by 2,495,486 total prizes. Our new overall odds of winning are 1 in 3.95!

Odds Of Winning The Lotto

Just like that I gave you a ticket with the best odds of winning, yet I took away most of the top prizes AND I’ve kept a bunch of extra ticket sales as pure profit!

Conclusion

Relying solely on the overall odds of scratchers as a way to determine the best odds of winning is a recipe for disaster.

The real “best odds of winning” will vary by the player and their own strategy.

Which Australian Lotto Has Best Odds Of Winning

Make sure to get a FREE account here at Lotto Edge. We offer lots of free tools to help you find the games with the best odds of winning for the strategies and prizes you want.