IF you’re a fan of a scratchcard, make sure you pick the right one if you want a chance of winning the jackpot.
One budding tech consultant has launched a website which analyses scratchcard data and offers you odds on the ones to pick to win big, the Daily Mail’s Money Mail reports.
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It comes as the biggest ever EuroMillions jackpot of £195million has just been claimed by a Brit with a winning ticket.
Will Love, from Clapham, London, set up smartscratchcard.co.uk only a week ago – it pulls data from the National Lottery website to estimate your true odds of winning.
It compiles data on scratchcards costing between £1 and £5 which offer prizes of up to £2million and also compares the remaining prizes and existing odds.
The idea behind the website came to 26-year-old Will after he discovered scratch cards are still available to buy in shops even after the top prizes have been claimed.
“It shocked me to learn how scratch cards are sold for jackpots that have already been won,” he said.
“It’s a joke really.”
The Sun previously revealed which scratch cards are the best value and the five games where you have the best chance of winning.
But smartscratchcard.co.uk uses an algorithm to give a rating out of 100 on the scratchcards – it takes into account factors such as the price of the card and whether the top prize is still available to be won.
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Anyone can go on to the website and search through different scratch cards.
It can help you sniff out the ones where the top prizes are still available.
As well as giving you the odds on getting the top prize, the site tells you how many prizes are left, and the chance of scoring one of the smaller prizes too.
You can also search by price, depending on whether you fancy splashing the case or buying a more budget option.
The best and worst scratchcards
When we checked the “£500 loaded” National Lottery scratchcard has the best overall rating on the site at 89.8/100.
Your odds of winning at least some money back are 1 in 3.09 – though this could be a small prize of just a pound or two.
There are 6,865 top prizes left out of 8,206.
And your estimated odds of winning the top prize are 1 in 1,575 – which means it ranks top out of 53 scratch cards.
But a higher algorithm rating doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re more likely to win the top jackpot – it just means it’s the best score based on all the factors considered.
The “Hot £50s” scratchcard algorithm rating is just 40.06/100 – but it has the second highest odds for winning the top prize currently.
You have a 1 in 1,611 chance of winning the jackpot with this one, according to the website.
At the other end of the spectrum, the “£100,000 Multiplier Pink” card has the lowest rating of just 39.74.
According to the site, your estimated odds of winning the top prize are just 1 in 7,139,430.
Close behind is the “£250,000 Orange” card, where your odds of hitting the bigtime stand at 1 in 6,784,794.
A spokesman for Camelot, which operates the National Lottery, said top-prize scratchcard information is also available on the National Lottery website as well as on in-store digital screens, at the point of purchase.
He said: “So 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.”
We’ve previously looked at the Lotto numbers that are most likely to come up, and the 10 areas in the UK with the most winners.
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