How does the SmartFactor work?
Instant games are not like Powerball or Megamillions or pick 4 or pick 5 games – those odds NEVER change!
Scratch-off games are different because, once the games are printed and out for sale, the odds DO change! This is why the lotteries publish data on all of their prizes remaining!
What the lottery websites DON’T do is make it easy for you to understand how the odds have changed for any of their games! They just want you to buy tickets, even if there are NO top prizes remaining!
This is where ScratchSmarter helps players like you ! We take all of the data on every game and we compare the updated odds of winning a top prize every week – FOR EVERY GAME!
How do odds change?
Let say that a game is printed with 1,000,000 ticket for sale and there are 15 top prizes mixed into that printing. The odds of winning a top prize are:
15/1,000,000
To simplify things, we give this a Smart Factor Rating of 1.0
Now, as top prizes are awarded and tickets are sold, the odds change:
If ten top prizes are won, that leave 5 top prizes left. Still looks like a good game to play, right?
Actually, you can’t say, unless you know the total tickets remaining!
If there are 900,000 tickets still for sale and only 5 top prizes, then the odds of winning a top prize are now WORSE than when the game was originally printed! Our SmartFactor rating would go down to 0.33 Playing that game hoping to win a top prize would be a WASTE OF MONEY because there are so many other games to buy with BETTER chances of winning a top prize.
However, if there are only 100,000 tickets still for sale – that changes everything! 5 top prizes remaining with 100,000 tickets for sale, creates a SmartFactor of 3.333! That means the odds of winning a top prize are now more than 3 times better than when the game was printed!.
Why does this matter? Because scratch-off games are RANDOMLY printed with top prizes throughout the printing. Sometimes they’re printed at the beginning of a game, sometimes they’re distributed evenly throughout the printing and sometimes the top prizes are printed towards the end of the printing.
This is why keeping track of all of the data is so helpful!
Want to see how this works?
Check our our example tool below – just move the sliders around to see how prizes remaining vs tickets remaining changes the SmartFactor calculation:
This Card Counting trick makes sense, right?
Its a simple way to compare all games that are available for sale so you know which games are good to play and which games are a waste of money!
We’d like to say we’re super smart and that we created this methodology, but in all honestly, we didn’t. We saw it being used somewhere else and adapted it to Scratch-Off games.
Where else is this used? Its used by professional card counters when playing Black Jack! They use a factor method by adding +1 or -1 when face cards are dealt from a hand. When the factor is high, they place a higher bet because the odds of winning a hand are higher!
The difference?
If a casino catches someone ‘counting cards’ they get thrown out of the casino and banned for life!
If the state lottery catches you counting cards…..they can’t do anything! They cannot ban you from counting cards for scratch-off games, but they do make it REALLY REALLY hard …..they do everything they can to make counting too time consuming for the average person
This is where ScratchSmarter makes it easy!
We’ve automated all of this data collection and analysis of all the data needed to give you the card count!
We do it every day and produce 4 reports for you once a week!
Click here to see a sample report:
So no matter how you like to buy your tickets we have the analysis all done for you to increase your odds of winning a top PRIZE!