SCRATCHCARD fans could have to spend MILLIONS to be in with a chance of hitting the jackpot, one expert has revealed.
Will Love, 26, has created a website which reveals your real chances of scoring the top prize on a scratchcard.
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The 26-year-old set up Smartscratchcard.co.uk to help people more easily understand their odds of winning.
Will, who lives in London and works in digital marketing, has done the number-crunching for every one of the 52 different scratchcards you can currently buy – and revealed the ones with the best and worst odds of winning.
And aspiring millionaires up and down the country will be dismayed to find out exactly how much you might have to spend to win the jackpot on some scratchcards.
“It’s outrageous,” Will told the Sun, as he revealed some of the odds.
Here’s everything you need to know before you buy your next scratchcard from the man in the know.
What is Smart Scratchcard?
It’s a website I’ve set up to help people understand their actual chances of winning on a scratchcard.
It’s entirely free to use and I don’t make any money out of it.
I use a computer algorithm to rank all the scratchcards you can currently buy based on various factors such as the number of top prizes still available to win, your odds of winning the top prize, and your chances of bagging any prize at all.
I also look at the return to player – for example: if you spend £100 on this scratchcard, how much could you expect to get back?
All the data is wrapped up to give an overall score for each scratchcard.
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Where did you get the idea for the website?
I’m a fan of a scratchcard – I often get one in my Christmas stocking, and it’s something I think of as a little impulse purchase when I’m in the supermarket.
But I read an article on The Sun about how a third of the jackpots for scratchcards still on sale have already been won, and it made me think.
I went and bought a scratchcard and looked on the back – it tells you some of the details and terms and conditions, but really the only useful bit of information on there is your odds of winning.
This is usually around 3/1 – but the catch is that these are your odds of winning ANY prize, not the top prize.
It doesn’t tell you how many of the top prizes there are, the chances of getting one, or if they’ve already been won.
Around 90% of the time you win, you’re only getting your money back.
One thing I was shocked to find out was that as long as the jackpot is below a certain amount, they can keep selling the scratchcard even if the top prize has already been won.
That means people are buying one thinking they have a chance of winning and they just don’t – to me, that’s almost fraud.
The Sun first uncovered this issue in 2017 when we revealed that eight out of 42 live games had one top prize left and two had none of the main pots available.
What happened next?
I started digging. The National Lottery has two different sets of data.
If you know where to look on its website, you can find out how many top prizes are remaining on all 52 scratchcards at any one time.
But that’s only half the story – it might say there are five prizes remaining on one, but it doesn’t tell you how many there were to begin with, whether it was six or 1,000.
I found more data though – whenever National Lottery publishes a new scratchcard, it sends a PDF of all the information about that card to the Gambling Commission including the number of cards being printed and expected return rate.
But it’s in a difficult document format and hard for consumers to access.
I spent three days going through every document manually – I felt so passionately about it and was on a complete roll.
I set up an algorithm that pulls in the real-time data from the National Lottery site and the data I mined so people can see all the information more easily.
So, what are my actual chances of winning?
It depends on the scratchcard.
What I found was that in some cases you’d have to spend £16million to win a top prize of £1million. It’s outrageous.
Obviously, along the way you’d win lots of smaller prizes so you wouldn’t be £15million out of pocket – but it shows just how tiny your chance of winning is.
This is the point of my site though – instead of looking on the back of the card and being told your odds are 1 in 3, I tell you: this is how much you’d have to spend, in theory, to win that top prize – and it’s shocking.
Should I stop buying scratchcards?
I’m not saying don’t buy scratchcards, but you should at least make sure you get one where you know the top prize is still available, and pick one that gives you the best chances of winning.
A lot of people pick based on the design or what the top prize is – often choosing the one with the jackpot in big bold letters – but usually these are the ones with the worst odds.
I haven’t stopped buying scratchcards since setting up the site. In fact, I’ve bought about five of the top-rated – after all, I’ve got to test my own theory.
That one has a 3 to 1 chance of winning any prize but so far the most I’ve got is my money back.
If I could change anything about the industry it would be that once all the top prizes have been won, that particular scratchcard should be withdrawn.
In the meantime, I want to give transparency to people on how small your chances really are.
A spokesman for Camelot, which operates the National Lottery, said top-prize scratchcard information is available on the National Lottery website as well as on in-store digital screens, at the point of purchase.
It said: “Even when there are no top prizes or only one top prize remaining, there are still lots of others available to be won from the remaining prize pool.”
“We adhere to a strict code of practice as approved by our regulator, the Gambling Commission, which sets out, among other things, the process we follow when the last top prize on a Scratchcard game has been claimed.”
