Is it possible to beat them? I saw an android app called Pikatikit which claims it can download information about the remaining prizes and somehow rank the games for each state. Could someone more mathematically inclined tell me if this is possible?

you could always do that by visiting the states lottery website. It is pretty easy to figure out which games have the best prizes remaining.

I wouldn't assume the information the state discloses about winning tickets remaining is accurate -- and I haven't seen any states that disclose the number of tickets remaining.

the only way you can beat them is if you see someone lose like 5 in a row on a ticket, then u jump in front and buy the next 2 and youll probably win.

As ridiculous as the strategy sounds -- there may be a foundation for it. In the past, the distribution of winners in many games has not been random -- the winners were random, but the distribution was governed. Not sure if or who is still doing that.

Can't you extrapolate the number of tickets remaining using the published "approximate odds" of holding a winning ticket? The published "approximate odds" change over time.

I useda buy them by the book and for example if the odds of winning a prize is 1:4.25 and you bought a unopened book of 100 tickets youll get 23- 24 winners guaranteed and this was always the case.

I have won 3 tickets in a row before, lost 17 in a row before, I was a regular and the gas station people useda tell me which books were in good shape(meaning most the book was sold and there were lots of winners left or biggest prize cashed so far was like $50)

i might sound crazy but im right, many yrs of evidence to determine it.

how much did the book for 100 net you?

I'm not sure how all states do it. I've looked at the local AZ site and it offers very little -- it tells how many tickets remain, but not how many there were. It's all a bit sketchy. I've read several comparison reports on all state lotteries, and it's clear that most, if not all, are similarly opaque -- always many pages of footnotes explaining the accounting discrepancies.

I doubt they can really track how many tickets remain, since they sell them in batches, and unknown quantities of those batches are remaining to be sold under store counters.

Shouldn't they be able to infer the rolls which have been sold by the winner codes which are redeemed? I guess the answer is they probably just don't care that much. Anyway, just for giggles I followed Pikatikit's advice last night and bought a couple of the best-ranked $20 game for Virginia and scored a $200 winner. I know, small sample size, but still promising...

The app or even just looking at their websites may not give you the exact current odds but it definitely gives you a small advantage. If you walk into a store and they have 25 games to pick from and you just pick based on what looks fun you may be picking a game where the top prizes are all gone. At least by looking at their websites you can make an informed decision on which games have the most prizes remaining.

The sale of tickets are recorded by UPC scans -- so I believe they can track them, and that the information is available to some people -- they just don't share it with the public in any transparent way.

I was thinking about the comment Mark275 made about buying a brick of tickets. The way they used to be sold here, the retailer would buy a $500 brick that had $150 in small winners for ~$300 -- and tickets had to be redeemed where they were purchased. The difference accounted for the retail commission. That system was gamed for years (plus, unredeemed tickets accrued to the benefit of the retailer instead of the state), so it was eventually changed.

Like all things the state attempts, their lotteries are FUBAR -- and I have no doubt there are investment opportunities -- I just wouldn't trust much of the public information to be complete, timely, or accurate.

This story provides zero meaningfulness and a fairly small sample size..

After high school I worked overnights in a gas station and I'd see so many degenerates buying tickets. Tons of people would buy them and scratch off right there, turn around and put right back in.

After awhile I noticed that one game always had a $50 winner in the last three tickets of the roll. The guy I worked with starting splitting it and we'd always buy the end of a roll of that ticket. He'd actually push that ticket to people looking to buy or drunks even just coming in for smokes or whatever just to get closer to the end.

We never hit a bigger ticket. It was always a $50 winner and once we got a $100. After cost and some putting it back into similar tickets to see if others were like that which we didn't find any other games at the end, we made out with an extra $500 or so each.

In certain jurisdictions, it's legal for places to sell private (i.e. not state run) lottery tickets. Generally they're called pull tab, punch card, "pickle cards," or a variety of other names. With these tickets, the merchant buys a block of tickets, perhaps 2500 of them, and there are a specific number of each prize in each block of tickets. So if you know how many of each ticket have been pulled, you can estimate what's left. I..e if out of the 2500 tickets, 2000 have been sold but the biggest prize hasn't been sold, you know the biggest prize is still remaining. No way to get rich off of these though because the biggest prize is usually $100, or perhaps $250 at most.

used to work overnights at a gas station as well. it's really ****ed up how the same woman can come in every night and blow $100 on those little tear-off ones with the 3 lemons and ****, and even if she doubles the $100 she just spends the whole $200 on more tickets until it's gone.

yeah, this + 1000

I remember my uncle won $2000 from buying $20 worth of scratchers.

He kept rolling that money into scratcher tickets and he was all like, "I started with $20 and made $2000, so if I played $200/day I should be able to make at least $400 a day ($200 profit) which is a lot less than the $2k I made..."

No matter how hard I tried to dissuade him, he wouldn't listen.

That $2000 lasted him about a month, playing between $100 and $200 per day. By the end of it, he had sunk another $400 into buying scratchers...

In the past I have purchased books of tickets $5 .. 60 tickets per book ($300). You can always count on getting back about $165 if you do not hit a big winner (Colorado). The largest guarenteed winner in the pack was $50. If I were to buy $300 worth again at one time, I would buy go to 10 stores and buy 6 tickets at each. Then you have a better chance at hitting more than 1 $50 winner.
I did win $5000 once when I bought 1 $3 ticket.....

You also have a better chance at hitting less than 1 $50 winner.

This gambling thing is harder than it seems.

Ehh, he's doing it right. If buying b the box you have less variance, then it's the same EV but more entertaining to buy from different boxes.

Yup

yeah i saw a woman do this once when i was on vacation and i was a little kid...the max prize was only a few hundred and she bought like hundreds of tickets. It made a lasting impression.

Thought this might be of interest to some people. Guy basically figured out on certain tickets, without scratching how to predict winners with pretty good accuracy.
http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/01/ff_lottery/all/1

I think that hardest thing to do if you did crack these tickets would be how to only buy the winning tickets. He suggests buying a large amount and then trying to return the losing unscratched ones, can't imagine that would be as easy as it sounds.

While this story was written last year, Srivastava discovered how to determine winners back in 2003. His revealings of his findings caused some of the games to get pulled. What surprised me most about the article (had read it a while back) was this:

“Lots of people buy lottery tickets in bulk to give away as prizes for contests,” he says. He asked several Toronto retailers if they would object to him buying tickets and then exchanging the unused, unscratched tickets. “Everybody said that would be totally fine. Nobody was even a tiny bit suspicious,” he says. “Why not? Because they all assumed the games are unbreakable. So what I would try to do is buy up lots of tickets, run them through my scanning machine, and then try to return the unscratched losers. Of course, you could also just find a retailer willing to cooperate or take a bribe. That might be easier.” The scam would involve getting access to opened but unsold books of tickets. A potential plunderer would need to sort through these tickets and selectively pick the winners. The losers would be sold to unwitting customers—or returned to the lottery after the game was taken off the market.

The following was also interesting:

Consider a series of reports by the Massachusetts state auditor. The reports describe a long list of troubling findings, such as the fact that one person cashed in 1,588 winning tickets between 2002 and 2004 for a grand total of $2.84 million.

A 1999 audit found that another person cashed in 149 tickets worth $237,000, while the top 10 multiple-prize winners had won 842 times for a total of $1.8 million

But the above makes sense by this statement:

The auditor attributed the high number of payouts going to single individuals to professional cashers. These cashers turn in others’ winning tickets—they are paid a small percentage—so the real winners can avoid taxes. But if those cashers were getting prepicked winners, that could be hard to uncover.

Another interesting aspect of lotteries:

Furthermore, the Massachusetts lottery has a history of dispensing large payouts to suspected criminals, at least in one Mass Millions game. In 1991, James “Whitey” Bulger, a notorious South Boston mob boss currently on the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted Fugitives list—he’s thought to be the inspiration for the Frank Costello character in The Departed—and three others cashed in a winning lottery ticket worth $14.3 million. He collected more than $350,000 before his indictment.

At the time, authorities thought Bulger was using the lottery to launder money: take illicit profits, buy a share in a winning lottery ticket, redeem it, and end up with clean cash. In this respect, the lottery system seems purpose-built for organized crime, says Michael Plichta, unit chief of the FBI’s organized crime section. “When I was working in Puerto Rico, I watched all these criminals use traditional lottery games to clean their money,” he remembers. “You’d bring these drug guys in, and you’d ask them where their income came from, how they could afford their mansion even though they didn’t have a job, and they’d produce all these winning lottery tickets. That’s when I began to realize that they were using the games to launder cash.”

This probably surprised me the most though:

And then there’s Joan Ginther, who has won more than $1 million from the Texas Lottery on four different occasions. She bought two of the winners from the same store in Bishop, Texas. What’s strangest of all, perhaps, is that three of Ginther’s wins came from scratch tickets with baited hooks and not from Mega Millions or Powerball. Last June, Ginther won $10 million from a $50 ticket, which is the largest scratch prize ever awarded by the Texas Lottery.

Very interesting article indeed but don't think it'd be worth doing what the statistician did. Tried looking up online if retailers here in the US would take back unscratched tickets and from what I could see is that they wouldn't. Maybe there are some more shady gas stations/convenience stores that would, or you could find some employees at these places and bribe them or work together with them to get only the winning tickets.