Friday, November 16, 2012

CA Lottery Second Chance/Replay

The California Lottery offers a second chance to win on all of their scratcher games and fantasy 5 tickets.  10 $1,000 winners are selected each quarter for each qualifying game and there is one end of game winner that wins the top prize for that game.  It seems like your odds might be pretty good in playing this as most people throw theirs away.  It is easy to enter, all you have to do is create an account at the CA lottery website and enter your ticket numbers on all of your losing tickets.  You can enter your losing ticket numbers here https://secondchance.calottery.com/second-chance/index/index/type/REPLAY/

Good Luck

How to Increase Your Chances of Winning Lotto Scratchers

There is only one way I know that you can increase your chances of winning on Lottery Scratchers.  You first check the number of winners for that particular scratcher on the CA lotto website such as this million dollar fortune page http://www.calottery.com/Play/Scratchers-games/$10-Scratchers/1000000-fortune-762

If you know how to do some simple math you can see if your odds are better or worse for winning the top or any of  the prizes.

As of this posting there have been only 3 winners with the odds of winning the top prize set at 1 in 1.2 million.  With 3 winners you would expect an average of 3.6 million tickets to have been sold.  However, if you look at the odds of the other prizes and multiply that by the number of winners, it appears that over 6 million tickets to have sold.  For example, the same game has 50 $10,000 winners with the odds set at 1 in 600,000.  Well 13 of those have already been won.  If you multiply 13 times 600,000 you get 7.8 million tickets sold. 

Please note, these are just averages as we do not know the exact amount sold, but it does give you slightly improved odds knowing there is a set amount of tickets for each game and you might improve your odds from 1 in 1.2million to 1 in 900,000.  Still a very tough game to win and that's about as close as you will ever get to improving your odds.

Sunday, November 11, 2012

Where do Lottery Funds Go

Like a majority of Americans, I play the lottery.  Whether it is the Super Lotto, Mega Millions or Scratchers every once in a while.  The problem with these games, in my opinion is that it doesn't seem like all of the funds generated from the lottery are not being distributed where they are supposed to.

You would figure they would have a website which shows the distribution of funds publicly.  Supposedly a large portion of the money is distributed to schools, however all I hear about is the lack of funds that schools have and the severe cut backs in the education system.  How is this possible?

For example, we know have $10 scratchers.  On the lottery website it says the chance of  winning a million dollar ticket is 1 in 1,200,000 and states there are 37 million dollar winners.  That means there should be 44.4 million tickets in distribution.  At $10 a pop, that means this game generates 444 million dollars in revenue.  The payouts are somewhere in the $100 million dollar range at the high end.

So my question is, where does the 344 million dollars in profit go?  And let me remind you, this is just for one game.  There are at least 25 other scratcher games going on as well.  With this much money, it makes you wonder why the schools are struggling, the state is at a huge deficit and California in general is in a poor economic state.

I would suggest that Californians ask for a public statement of where these lotto funds go.  I worry that it helps campaigns and other public office causes other than what it is stated to do.