My approach to gambling with scratch tickets

As an older adult male I have a limited range of activities that arouse any excitement ... to say the least. Over the years I have pursued several types of gambling requiring some skill—poker, blackjack, craps—but have never put in the effort and time to become good at any of them.

I have also tried the mindless gambling of slot machines (well, not entirely mindless because you have to know how multiply your payoff to win big on some slots), numbers lotteries, and—now—scratch tickets. And for now scratch tickets are my sole gambling choice.

This is how I play

I have a budget of $50 per month. This is my "entertainment" budget. I could spend it on going to a couple of movies, but I choose to purchase NJ Lottery scratch tickets, for several reasons. One of the reasons is actually altruistic. The money New Jersey earns from its lottery goes to pay for social services that I support, like education.

But, of course, the main reason for gambling is the excitement from the sense of anticipation of the possibility of winning big. It does get my juices flowing ...

The danger, of course, is addiction. And being something of a obsessive compulsive I have to impose boundaries. One of the boundaries is to write about it ...

Back to my theory of gambling with scratch tickets ...

OK, the State wants us to buy a lot of tickets and it uses the lure of the largest possible jackpot for any one "game"—each scratch ticket series is a "game"—to get us to play. It also publishes the number of outstanding major prizes for each game on its website. (See my prior post: NJ Lottety $1 scratch tickets in play ...

So we have a situation where anyone can look up the number of outstanding major prizes for a given game, and, of course, no one would want to buy a ticket for a game whose major prizes were all or nearly all gone. On the other hand, if there was nothing being won, that could also create a lack of interest.

So I have come up with a theory that I am currently testing. It would seem that the best way to run a scratch ticket game is to have a lot of small to medium payouts at the very beginning of a game, with maybe a major one thrown in. This would create buzz and increase sales. It is the "startup" period. Then there would come a period—I call it the "interim" period—when prizes were less frequent and  the tickets are pretty much there for filler in the rack of choices—spur of the moment "maybe I will get lucky" type of gambling—which I used to do  off an on for years and could very well be the "bread and butter" period for a given game.

What does this mean? To me it means that unless the NJ Lottery is simply randomizing the sequence of prizes in each game, it could have an algorithm for sequencing the prizes within the series of ticket to optimize their sale. At the moment I am simply musing about it, and there probably are a number of folks who are much further ahead of me in researching and analyzing what goes on.

In my next post I will give you an example.