What have you wanted to know about how prizes are distributed, claimed, etc?
I have a lot of data.
I need to know what questions to ask.
I've written some software to automatically get scratchoff data from state's websites each day. That tells me how many tickets are sold each day, how many grand prizes remain, etc...
One thing I was able to gleam from this data is an answer to the question of "Are grand prizes weighted towards the end of a game?"
I did this buy calculating the average percentage of total tickets sold for each game and the average percentage of grand prizes sold for each game.
If it was a fair distribution, you would expect those two to be equal. On average, when 50% of tickets have been sold, 50% of grand prizes will have been sold.
It was my assumption that grand prizes would be weighted towards the end of games. If they were truly random and if it was possible for all the grand prizes to be sold at the beginning of the game, then states would risk losing money by payout out all their grand prizes at the start of a game and nobody wanting to buy any more tickets.
The results confirm that assumption.
average_game_percent_tickets_remain |
average_grand_prize_percent_remain |
0.350615711252654 |
0.380658174097665
|
Another thing you might find interesting is to see how that compares across different states. Are some states more fair than others in this regard?
state |
num_games |
game_tickets_percent_remain |
grand_prize_percent_remain |
ar |
73 |
0.3 |
0.36 |
ca |
51 |
0.38 |
0.39 |
la |
51 |
0.38 |
0.44 |
md |
54 |
0.48 |
0.48 |
nj |
148 |
0.26 |
0.3 |
tx |
94 |
0.42 |
0.42 |
You'll see New Jersey, Arkansas, and Louisiana are the states that back-weight their grand prizes while California, Texas, and Maryland don't appear to do so. I thought this might be because of the states use different companies to print their tickets, but New Jersey and California both use Scientific Games.
One thing I've been considering is that California publishes a full list of retailers with data about which are "lucky" and sell large numbers of winning tickets. I thought it might be interesting to see if anything can be figured out from that, but I haven't gotten around to it yet.
Let me know if you have anything you're curious about.