Well, as the saying goes, "It takes money to make money."
It's basically a workaround for restrictions on online lottery sales. I'm not sure how states should handle online lottery gambling—there are a lot of considerations around addiction, potential fraud, money laundering, and erosion of retailer lottery revenue and shopper base—but I don't think this is it.
Haven't ever dug into it but the app doesn't require a login to use that function so I'm willing to bet there's an unauthenticated API endpoint that could be sniffed out (they may possibly have it documented somewhere too).
Outside of being a fun itch to scratch, using the app directly is fast enough with very little effort.
I pick up and scan any scratchers I find littered near stores. I've made a few hundred dollars over the years on misprints like that.
For a visual version of the above. Go check out Mr Beast’s video where they scratch off 1,000,000 dollars worth of scratch offs. The ending wasn’t surprising to me but may be to some.
I don’t even play the game on the scratcher sometimes.
Money? :)
The link therein has suffered link rot, try: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Lottery_%28Ireland%29...
A similar game feature is "roll down", again excess prize money accumulates over several drawings, and when a certain criteria is met, the excess prize money is distributed over some set of tickets (possibly all winners). Again, this sets up the possibility of a positive expected value, and you have to consider other ticket buyers as well.
A trickier one is for scratch off games. Many lotteries share the number of tickets sold and the prizes left. If you assume all (big?) prizes are redeemed shortly after their ticket is sold, you can estimate the expected value of purchasing the remaining tickets. When the game opens, the expected value of a ticket is less than the purchase price, but depending on the observations of tickets sold and prizes redeemed, you might estimate that the expected value of the remainder of tickets has improved.
Ex: if there were 1 million scratchers printed, the cost per scratcher was $1, and there was only one prize $500,000on open the expected value of a $1 ticket would be $0.50. If the winning ticket was redeemed, the expected value of remaining tickets would be $0. If it was reported that 999,999 tickets were sold and the winner had not yet been claimed, it might be reasonable to assume a higher expected value for the last ticket --- although there's no rigorous proof there, someone may have purchased the winning ticket already and not redeemed it for whatever reason.
In most cases, there is, which is part of why a huge percentage of scratchoff prizes are won by workers at the place that sells them. Most players will scratch and redeem their prizes right in front of you, so if you watch a certain number of scratches occur in a roll and you know the prize structure of the particular card, you can calculate how many non-winning scratches you need to see for the odds to be in your favor.
I looked into this a few years ago and considered starting one of those stands that sells scratchoffs to do just this, but decided a) it wasn't quite lucrative enough to be worth it, and b) I wasn't sure of the ethics of skewing the odds against your customers like this anyway.
This is interesting because I don’t think anyone would view the store as unethical for continuing to sell tickets from a roll when they know there have already been X winners from that role and therefore customer odds have gone down.
The problem with selling out the roll when winning tickets have already been sold only occurs in tandem with the retailer buying remaining tickets when only non-winners have been sold so far. These aren't separable situations.
Even if you can't buy every ticket, there is well-established math about how to optimize profit from a venture with known risk and reward, and the math does not require you to exhaust the statistical universe.
Stanford statistitian texas scratch loto
They absolutely aren’t trying to buy them all, that would just be a guaranteed loss, since they only return about 40 cents on the dollar.
Net EV=cost to buy in - probability of winning * (jackpot size / number of people you split it with)
If you have a 1% chance of winning $100 your EV is $1. If you pay $1 to play you breakeven. If the pot is $200 then your EV is $2. You would pay $1 all day for that. But again the risk is more people want to play. If 2 people win then your EV drops back to even.
So the lottery makes more the bigger the prize gets. They don't really care who wins or how much they get.
The lottery is always negative-EV for the average ticket-buyer, but it can sometimes be positive-EV for the marginal ticket-buyer.
So the net result in our game is that each hand you play, you win $0.98. A skilled video poker player can get around 1000 hands per hour, so you'd be earning around $980 per hour in the longrun. Casino comps make this even more profitable. Depending on the game/casino casinos will generally comp around ~20% of their expected profit against you, and that excludes jackpots. For our imaginary $1 game with a 2% margin that means you'd also be getting $0.004 per hand back in comps. It becomes quite significant at high stakes.
That must have been tense knowing they didn't purchase that last fraction of a percent.
[1] https://www.statesman.com/story/news/politics/state/2025/02/...
Paywalled, but looks like archive.is has it: https://archive.is/256Hz
https://www.texastribune.org/2025/02/27/texas-senate-lottery...
What am I missing here?
With 54 x 53 x 52 ... you get all of the permutations of all the sequences. It generates 1,2,3..., 2,1,3..., 3,1,2..., etc.
Yeah, I missed that. And each sequence has 6! permutations. Etc.