One of the most common questions we get here at the lottery has to do with the issue of overall odds, and what exactly they mean.
I've blogged about it here before, but the questions keep coming, so I think it's something we should cover again. The question we get usually goes something like this (although it's sometimes not this polite): Your scratch game says it has overall odds of winning of 1 in 3.84. I bought four tickets, but none of them won. I think your odds are wrong.
The short answer is that no, the odds aren’t wrong. But the full explanation is a bit more detailed than that.
We provide both the overall odds of winning in our games and the odds of winning for individual prize levels. We’re trying to provide the fullest amount of information possible to help you decide which tickets you want to buy.
Let's take our current "4 Way Cash" scratch game as an example. It has overall odds of winning of 1 in 3.84. Those odds don't mean that if you buy four tickets in the game, one of them is guaranteed to win a prize. They mean that if you bought all of the tickets available in the game, about 1 in 4 would win a prize.
Each of our games often involve millions of tickets and for security reasons, winning tickets are randomly distributed to ensure that no one -- not even those of us who work at the lottery -- knows exactly which tickets are winners. That also means that winning tickets in our games are in no particular order.
You can find information about the odds in our games on our tickets themselves, on our Web site and in the brochures we distribute about our games. If you ever need more information, just let us know and we’ll be glad to share it with you!
Comments