Instant lottery games

I'm in Pennsylvania, so I just play the PA lottery, but those in other states can also offer advice for what works for instant games in their states. I love to play scratch-off instant lottery games - and have played a lot, but $50 is the most I have won. I've done that twice, and have also won $40 a few times. Do you like to play? And if you do, do you have any advice on how to get big winners?

Here are a few things I've heard:

1. Buy whole rolls - too expensive for me
2. Buy the last ticket in a roll - may work, but not always. Bought the last two $50,000 Birthday Cash tickets on a roll today, and both were losers.
3. Don't buy the ticket after a ticket you have won on - I have won on two tickets in a row a few times before
4. Don't buy the first ticket in a roll - this might be good advice
5. There's a rule in PA that says you can't have a stretch of losers in a row that exceeds 2.5 times the game's odds. I've found this to be true. But if you buy 13 tickets, you may still only get $2 back.

As well as the prizes that haven't yet paid out. As such, you can figure the rough odds that any particular ticket you buy will be a big winner.

I'm in PA as well, and I've never won more than $25 on an instant ticket.

I bought my wife a bunch of breast cancer awareness lottery tickets one year. She thought it was special.

:thumbsup:

I've found you hit on those eventually...but I've also played the Monopoly scratch offs and won $25 several times

I tend to go from BlackJack (fairly lucky with the small prizes) to Fantastic 5s to Goldrush Gus to $10,000 A Month For Life and so on. I play Birthday Cash mostly on birthdays. I played today because it is my late grandmother's birthday. I won $40 on my birthday this year, and $20 on my dad's birthday lasy year. What is the most you won on $1,000 A Week For Life?

might have been $40? for some reason, $40 is in my head :shrug:

the major exception being NY. Here in CA, for instance, there's only one scratcher with a prize of even $1 million (another is winding down). And it's five bucks!! Yet it's all I have to keep me going while both draw games are down near the minimum. :(

He's evil

(Two of our friends are in the King Arthur commercial, so they met him....)

I don't get them a lot but occasionally I will buy one. I won $150 once. Another time I got $100. So I've had some luck.

Hi, blue_onyx! :hi:

I won the $150 at least 10 years ago. The $100 win was maybe 5 years ago.

Hi :hi:

So I don't play them very often.

buy tickets for new games within the first few days they come out. The lottery board "plants" winners early to make people think there will always be winning tickets in the new games.

Then again, I just bought a $5 ticket on a new game and got bupkiss, so there ya go.

Got $50 on King of Cash when it first came out.

Lucky day today - $40 on BlackJack! That's my highest on BlackJack, even counting dealer Bust tickets (got 2 of those, were $10 each.)

Can I rub your avatar for good luck? I need some quick cash too. :D

I had to put 20 bucks in my tank to get home, so I ended up winning my gas, so to speak.

but it took her $10 to do it.

She puts way too much into it and she isn't even close to breaking even.

I really wish she'd stop doing it.

Irony is that the county agency I work for we get most of our funding from the lottery. I hate seeing money that pays my salary going back to the state.

tax purposes. So I have a place where I keep all my losing tickets. :hi:

The lottery, scratch off tickets, gambling in general is to simply separate those with poor math skills from their money.:shrug:

The occasional Powerball, too. I buy quite a few, but do play responsibly.

That sweet, sweet lottery vending machine at the former (?) Albertson's on 183 in Austin. Quite a few $50 & $40 and even 2 $80 winners off $1 tickets. :-)

#2 is true; #4 is true. When I buy tickets, I like to see numbers that are fairly high, like near the end of the roll.

The cheaper tickets ($2) are much harder to win on, in my experience, so I rarely buy them. But at the end of the day, it's luck of the draw. You'll drive yourself mad trying to find any kind of predictability with these things.