How The Scratch Sheet Works
The number on the back of the ticket is a lie of omission
Every Florida scratch-off prints its overall odds right on the back — "1 in 4.03," that sort of thing. Those odds are fixed the day the game is designed and never change. What they don't tell you is the thing that actually matters: how many of the good prizes are still unclaimed right now.
A brand-new $30 game and the same game eleven months later have identical printed odds. But if every seven-figure prize has already been won, the second one is a worse bet — sometimes dramatically worse — and nothing on the ticket says so.
The Scratch Sheet exists to close that gap.
Printed return vs. current return
We work in return per dollar — how much of every dollar spent comes back as prizes, on average.
- Printed return is what the game paid back the day it launched, across all its prizes.
- Current return is what's left: the value of the prizes still unclaimed, spread over the tickets we estimate are still out there.
When a game runs hot — unlucky early buyers leave more good prizes in the pile than expected — current return climbs above printed. When the big prizes get picked off early, it sinks below. That drift is the whole game.
Here's a real one:
How we estimate what's left
Florida publishes, per game, how many of each prize tier were printed and how many remain. From that we do two things:
- Estimate the print run. Each prize tier implies a total number of tickets (prize count × that tier's odds). We take the median across all tiers — they agree within a fraction of a percent — which smooths out rounding.
- Estimate tickets remaining. The two smallest prize tiers are enormous, uniform samples — millions of tickets each — so how depleted they are tracks overall sales almost exactly. We use their unclaimed share to estimate how many tickets are left in circulation.
Current return is then just the remaining prize value divided by the tickets remaining divided by the price. We recompute it for every active game twice a day.
What this can — and can't — tell you
It can tell you which games are currently paying back more of your dollar than others, which have quietly gone cold, and which still have their top prizes. Right now there are 18 games on shelves whose top prizes are already gone.
It can't turn scratch-offs into a winning bet. A few honest caveats:
- Every game still returns less than a dollar per dollar — that's how the lottery funds itself. A high number is less bad, not good.
- A return propped up by one unclaimed seven-figure prize isn't something you can actually harvest at retail scale. Treat those with suspicion.
- Estimates carry sampling noise, worst near the very end of a game's run.
- Prizes over $600 are taxable; free-ticket tiers are valued at face.
Treat The Scratch Sheet as a filter for avoiding bad tickets — not a money machine. If you're going to buy a scratch-off anyway, buy a less-bad one.