The $100 scratch-off experiment

Monday June 4, 2007 · 302 views · 0 comments

Biting off an experiment I found on Neville's Blog, I figured I would try my luck and see what (if anything) I could earn in purchasing $100 in scratch off tickets. For the record, I hardly if ever gamble (casino's included) so I figured what came out of it I would try and have fun in the process. Before I started, I told myself that I would re-invest every dollar of my earnings until I either reached 10k (hehe) or $0 (more like it). As you will see, my fainted delusions of actually wining quickly withered away. Here's how my experiment went:

Round 1, $100
To start off with, I went to the atm and withdrew $100. I took the money and purchased 50 - $2 dollar Lucky Roller tickets from 3 different locations, the Dash-in (Shell owned), 7-11 and one of the local liquor stores.

I sat down with my girl and started scratching them off, laying out a trashbag to catch up of all the metalic-scratch-off stuff that the tickets produce. After about 20 mins we finished and I counted the win pile. Out of the 50 tickets, only 12 of them were winners (24%) producing only $64 bucks in earnings.

Round 2, $64
With my 34% loss from round 1, I decided to switch up the strategy and see if my luck would do any better with the 1$ scratch offs, the Triple Triplers. I went back out to the stores and purchased 64 -$1 Triple Triplers. I immediately noticed that the odds of winning on these tickets was less than that of the Lucky Rollers, but I forged forward hoping that it wouldn't make much of a difference.

This was a little bit daunting, but after about 25 mins or so we were done. Out of the 64 tickets we scratched off, only 11 of which were winners (17%)... This came no where close to the estimated 1 in 4.25 percent chance of winning and my 'earnings' reflected it. I netted a paltry $17, a net loss of 64%!!!

Round 3, $17
At this point I'm starting to think that the higher purchase price tickets will produce bigger earnings and have a higher frequency of winning. With that in mind, I went back out to the store (7-11 only this time) and purchased 8 - $2 Heads or Tails and 1-$1 Jokers Wild tickets...

Disappointment struck yet again, this time only winning $5. Out of the 9 tickets, only 1 was a winner having a win rate of 11%. At this point I was getting a little tired of scratching off tickets but the glimmer of hope that I had in winning a big pay off kept me going.

Round 4
Down to my last $5 bucks, I drove back to the 7-11 and picked up 1-$3 Instant Keno and 2-$1 7^th Inning Stretch tickets.

As you might have expected, no big winners. Only of the tickets was a winner (33%) but it was only for $2. I decided to stop there since it was 11pm and the stores no longer were selling tickets.

In all I had fun scratching my way to a net loss of $98 but out of it I learned some important things, the more money the ticket costs, the more money you might possibly win, the odds on the back of the tickets are BS, and I'm not as lucky as Neville who actually made $2!! Oh well, I had fun anyway... and will try the same experiment again next month =)