A Coin Flip, Rolling The Dice, Shuffling The Cards: A Look At What The Odds Mean

Maybe the best way to explain the odds of winning in a lottery game is to compare them to something else entirely. So we made some new videos to do just that.

Let’s start with scratch games. The odds of winning on a scratch ticket are a lot like the outcome of shuffling a deck of cards. There are 4 suits in the deck, but after the cards are shuffled into random order, you can go a lot more than 4 cards in a row without finding a particular suit.

For InstaPlay games, think of the odds like flipping a coin. You’ve got a 50/50 chance that the outcome will be heads or tails, but we all know you can flip a coin several times in a row with only one outcome.

For pull-tab games, the odds can be compared to rolling a dice. You’ve got a 1 in 6 chance of rolling one of the numbers on the dice, but you can roll it time after time without landing on the number you want!

For lotto games – including Powerball® and Mega Millions® – the odds of winning come from the numbers available to play, and all the different ways you can combine them.

We used each of those concepts for the new videos that went live today to explain the odds of winning in our games. Each video is only about a minute long to quickly provide the details involved.

You can find the videos through the links in this blog entry, and we'll also post them on our website.  

Whether you play the lottery or not, we want everyone to have an accurate understanding of how our games work. These new videos are part of that effort.

Comments

[Mary Neubauer]

Hi, Jack. That information is already available on our website. On the page for each individual scratch and InstaPlay game, there is a link to its Game Rules. The rules document includes a section titled: "Expected Number and Value of Prizes." In that section, you can see the number of tickets in the game as well as the number of prizes available in it.

[Jack]

How come you can't tell us how many tickets are in each scratch ticket game!? I believe the Missouri Lottery on their website tells you how many tickets are in each game as well as how many prizes are in each game.