What's Scratchy?
Basically a cheat sheet for buying scratch tickets in California.
The idea behind it
You know how scratch tickets say something like "odds of winning: 1 in 4.78" on the back? That number is calculated before a single ticket gets sold. It doesn't account for all the winning tickets that have already been scratched and claimed.
Scratchy fixes that. We pull live data straight from the California Lottery to see how many prizes are still out there for each game, then recalculate the odds based on what's actually left. Some games still have tons of big prizes unclaimed. Others are basically picked clean. Now you can tell the difference before you spend your money.
How we calculate the odds
We grab the live prize data
The California Lottery publishes how many prizes have been claimed for every active scratch game. We fetch that data every time you load the page so you're always looking at current numbers.
We figure out how many tickets are left
Using the printed odds (like "1 in 4.78") and the total number of prizes, we can work backwards to estimate how many tickets were originally printed for that game. From there we estimate how many are still sitting unsold in stores.
We calculate live odds
Simple math: tickets remaining divided by prizes remaining. That gives you a much more honest picture of your chances right now, not six months ago when the game launched.
We calculate Expected Value (EV)
EV tells you how much you'd get back on average for every dollar you spend. We look at every prize tier still available, weight it by how likely you are to win it, and add it all up. Every lottery game has negative EV (that's how the state makes money) but some are way less bad than others. That's what we're trying to show you.
What the colors mean
Each row in the table is color coded so you can spot the good ones at a glance.
You're losing less than 20 cents per dollar on average. For lottery scratchers that's genuinely pretty good. Grab these while they last.
You're losing somewhere between 20 and 35 cents per dollar. Pretty standard lottery stuff. Not ideal but not a disaster either.
Most of the prizes are already gone and the odds have gotten pretty rough. Your money is better spent on a different game.
Princeton grads won $6 million in scratch tickets. Here's how.
A group of Princeton graduates, led by a guy named Manuel Montori, went on an 18-month winning streak across multiple states and cashed over 66 winning scratch tickets totaling more than $6 million. On one single day in September, Montori cashed 61 winning tickets.
Their approach was systematic. They weren't just walking into a gas station and grabbing random tickets. They were doing their homework on which games had the best remaining prizes and going after those. A UC Berkeley statistics professor who looked at their results said:
"They're either the luckiest people in the world, or they found a way to beat the system." Philip Stark, Statistics Professor, UC Berkeley
We're not saying Scratchy will make you $6 million. But the core idea behind what they did, knowing which games still have prizes left and which ones are picked clean, is exactly what this tool shows you. That kind of data used to take serious legwork to dig up. Now it's right here on one page, free, updated every time you load it.
📰 Read the full ABC7 storyA few things worth knowing
Scratchy is not affiliated with the California Lottery in any way. We're just using their publicly available data to do some extra math for you.
The odds we show are estimates. The California Lottery doesn't publish exact print run numbers so there's some guesswork involved in our ticket count calculations. Think of it as a useful guide rather than a guarantee.
At the end of the day, scratch tickets are still gambling. Please play for fun and only spend what you're comfortable losing. If gambling ever stops feeling fun, call 1-800-GAMBLER.