How Scratch Better works
Scratch Better reads what lotteries publish about their own scratch-off tickets and puts it in one place: how many prizes are left, what the printed odds were, and which games have already given away everything worth winning.
Where the numbers come from
Every figure on this site is taken from a lottery's own website, published feed or prize document. There is no second-hand data, no estimates filling gaps and nothing copied from another tracker. Each state or country page cites the exact page its numbers came from, and each game page links to that game on the operator's site so anything here can be checked against the source in one click.
Data is re-read on a schedule — every six hours for feeds that change daily, once a day for prize plans that only change when a ticket launches. When an operator's page moves or breaks, that jurisdiction stops updating rather than showing yesterday's numbers as if they were today's, and it is removed from the site until it can be read properly again. Three US states are out for exactly that reason.
What the ranking actually means
The app compares a game's current prize mix against the mix it was printed with. If a ticket launched with ten $10,000 prizes and nine have been claimed, what is left is worth less than what was advertised, even though the odds printed on the back have not changed. That comparison produces a modelled return, which is then graded Great, Okay or Skip against fixed thresholds.
This is a relative judgement and nothing more. It says which ticket is the least bad of the ones on the shelf today. It does not say any ticket is a good bet, because none of them are: every scratch-off game in every jurisdiction pays out less than it takes in, by design, and no amount of prize-tracking changes that. Anyone promising an edge over the lottery is selling something.
What this site will not do
- Sell tickets, or link to anyone who does. We are not a retailer, a courier or an affiliate. There is no way to buy a ticket from here and there never will be.
- Claim an edge. No system beats a scratch-off. We say which prizes are gone; we do not say you will win.
- Invent a number. If a lottery does not publish how many prizes are left, the page says so instead of guessing. Most countries outside the US do not publish it, and those pages rank nothing at all.
- Work around a lottery that does not want to be read. We honour robots.txt, crawl slowly and identify ourselves. Where an operator blocks us we leave, and the relevant page explains why it is missing rather than quietly serving stale data.
Who this is for
People who are going to buy a scratch-off anyway and would rather not buy the one whose top prize was claimed eight months ago. That is the whole idea. If you are looking for a way to make money, this is the wrong site, and the odds on every page here will tell you so.
Who runs it
Scratch Better is built and maintained by one independent developer. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by or connected to any lottery, and it has no commercial relationship with any operator whose data it reads. The site is paid for by advertising and by subscriptions to the iPhone app.
Scratch Better is not affiliated with any state lottery and does not sell tickets. Rankings are relative, not a guaranteed edge.