[eihli]

Here's the data through ~October of last year. ~500MB.

https://docs.zohopublic.com/file/pze38c35faf87eb654907b51890...

I'm using it to power https://scratchoff-odds.com right now.

[jliptzin]

I see one game in Missouri has a score of 146. Is there anything stopping someone from buying all the remaining tickets (other than time and money obviously) and pocketing the $4 million difference?

Also, is it possible someone has grand prize winner but incorrectly throws it in the trash (because they overlooked the fact that it was a winner/didn’t scratch it all the way off)? Would the website pick up on that?

[eihli]

Nothing stopping someone from buying all the remaining tickets. But if you do the math, I think you'll find it's still not worth it. How fast can you scratch/verify tickets? If you take the lump sum, you get something like 60% of the grand prize. If you take the annuity, it pays out over 20-40 years. Taxes will take out another chunk.

But everyone's situation is different. If you already have losses that could be tax-deducted from the win, that would help you. If you could monetize the process by selling your story or gaining youtube fame, that would help. Some youtuber did buy $1,000,000 worth of tickets without any particular strategy and presumably made profit from the youtube side of his business. As expected, he got back ~70% so it only cost him ~$300k + production costs.

[41b696ef1113]

What is with the fractional numbers in `game.num_tx_initial` for some of the rows? I am assuming this is number of tickets sold. Parsing error?

Edit: The site is pretty cool. I get strong vibes of the Winfall lottery story[0]

[0] https://highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/lotto-winner...

[eihli]

Some states only publish claim numbers for prizes over a certain amount. For prizes below that amount, I estimate using the % claimed of all published prizes.

If 25% of the prizes greater than $30 have been claimed, then I assume 25% of the prizes lesser than $30 have been claimed. Everything in the low numbers has large enough data pools for it to average out accurately. It's not until you get to the $600+ prize level where things would be really inaccurate.

You'll also note there's usually a lag for prizes $600+.

When you look at aggregates across states, you might see something like 25% of prizes below $600 have been claimed but only 19% of prizes above $600 have been claimed. I figure that's because $600+ has to be claimed at lottery headquarters and go on taxes. So people might delay, try to hide the money from their spouse, wait for tax reasons, the headquarters has to manually process it rather than the automated machine at a retail outlet, whatever...

[eihli]

Actually that other explanation is for fractional tickets in other locations of the database, like prizes remaining.

Specifically in `num_tx_initial` it might be because they don't report the number of tickets printed. But if they print the odds of a win and numbers of winners available, then you can estimate how many non-winners there are and thus how many printed tickets there are.

[eihli]

If you do something cool with it, let me know at [e-mail].