GAME END DATE
or
LAST DAY TO CLAIM

The “Game End Date” is the date that a lot of people confuse with ‘Last date to claim a prize date’.  These are two VERY IMPORTANT, but VERY DIFFERENT dates.

The last date to claim a prize date is just that – the very last date that the lottery will payout on a winning ticket.

The Game End Date is not what most people think it is.  Most people think it means its the last date that the game is for sale to anyone.

IT IS NOT!

The Game End Date is the last day the LOTTERY stops distributing the game to retailers and to vending machines.  It doesn’t mean it is the last day that game is for sale!

Now, this is where we get a lot of confusion – because each and every state is different in how they handle games that have an “End Date”.

• Some states will collect opened and unopened packs of tickets from retailers on ‘games ended’
• Some states will only collect unopened packs of tickets from retailers
• Some states won’t collect ANY of these games.  They’ll just let the retailers sell them until their gone.
• Most states give ONE YEAR to claim a prize after the END DATE is published, and some states are less than a year. (Florida gives 90 days between End Date and Last day to claim).

Most people think that the ‘one year to claim’ window is just being nice to people who misplaced their winning ticket in a pocketbook or in a drawer and forgot to claim it.    Like the lottery is just being nice to people so they can claim their prize.

Nope!! 

The lottery doesn’t want to pay out on prizes if they don’t have to!  The time between END DATE and LAST DATE TO CLAIM lets the lottery pad the time retailers have to sell off the open packs of games they have in stock OR give the lottery time to collect outstanding packs of tickets.

Why does this matter? 

The lottery will end games early for many reasons.  But the biggest reason is this:

“They’re trying to NOT SELL THE BIG WINNING TICKETS that haven’t been claimed yet!”

They want to maximize the ROI (Return on Investment)  for every game they print!  They want to KEEP that money, not give it away!

Our policy is simple:  We keep games on our reports until the LAST DATE TO CLAIM date.

Why?   Its simple – if you can still buy the game somewhere AND you win, the lottery still has to pay you the prize amount!

We keep these games on our reports to give you the most information possible.

What does this mean for you?   Frankly, it means that you may not be able to find the games that we have rated as the very best on our report on any given week. This is confusing for some of our customers and they claim that we’re lazy or that we’re creating bad reports.

This definitely isn’t the case.

We keep these games on our reports because you can still claim the prize if you can find the game for sale!

Think about it……What if you found a retailer still selling the best-rated game on our report?

If we didn’t have that game on our report, you wouldn’t buy it and you wouldn’t win the big outstanding prize!  The BIG PRIZE that the lottery doesn’t want you to win!    The lottery comes around the next week and collects those tickets and they don’t have to pay out the big prize!  We’d be helping the lottery if we did that.  We wouldn’t be helping you!

So, if you’re looking at our report and you can’t find the top game on our report at you local retailer, just keep looking around at other retailers!   OR move down the list of games on our report to the next game. Buy that game if they have it.

Ignore the retailer when you’re looking for the top game – he’ll huff and say ‘That game ended!’ (He’s right – it ended for him – he can’t get it and sell it anymore.)

BUT IT HASN’T ENDED FOR YOU! 

Keep looking for only the very BEST GAME you can find!

When playing from our reports, please remember to avoid the YELLOW games – the odds haven’t changed enough on those games.  And NEVER buy a RED game – they don’t have any top prizes remaining!

If you find a game in your retailer that isn’t on your report, it could mean that the retailer is still selling it, even if the last day to claim has passed – this is even WORSE than a game being RED on our report!  Ok admittedly, this probably won’t happen, but it could.  We aren’t going to tell you that all retailers are honest, good people.

In reality, if you find a game that isn’t on our report yet, it might just be a brand new game and our scraping code hasn’t picked it up yet.  Wait a week or two and you should see it pop up with a smart factor around 1.0 because, for new games, the odds of winning big usually don’t change much the first couple of weeks its for sale.  If you’re really concerned that we’re missing a games, please email us at Info@ScratchSmarter.com and we’ll investigate it!