How to Find Odds of Claimers

In our weekly video series, we discuss what a Claimer is and how you can calculate the odds to hit these highly sought after prizes. Watch our YouTube video or read the full transcript below.

Hi and welcome to Lotto Edge. This is Jared, the founder and chief lottery nerd here at Lotto Edge.

This week we rolled out one of the most innovative scratch off rankings we’ve ever put out.

And we call that new ranking the Best Odds to hit a Claimer.

You can find that under our Premium Rankings in the General section here. Its called the Best Odds for a Claimer.

Alright, so you might be wondering, what the heck is a claimer?

A Claimer is the term that we use for prizes that require you to claim your winnings at lottery headquarters or maybe a regional claim center!

What we are talking about here are really big prizes. These are the ones your local lottery retailer can’t cash for you.

States vary slightly on the amount that requires you to drive to lottery headquarters to make a claim. Some states its $500 and up, others its $600 and up and there may be others. However, for our rankings, we set the amount at $500 and up across all states.

What we do is we look at all the prizes $500 and up on a daily basis, calculate those daily odds to hit one of those prizes, and then rank them from the best to worst.

But today I’m going to show you an example how you can calculate the odds to hit a claimer for yourself.

Our data tracks multiple calculations daily and it would be really difficult for someone to do it on their own. However, what I’m going to show you how to do a basic back of the envelope calculation using the game’s starting data just to get an idea if your game is good or bad for claimers.

Let’s go ahead and take a look at North Carolina since we have a lot of users from that state. I’m going ahead and take this first game here, Mega 7s and what I’m going to do here is I’m going to break it down into three simple steps on how to calculate the odds to hit a claimer for yourself.

So the first step is we want to get an estimate of the number of tickets that were printed. Some states will tell you how many tickets were printed. Others you’re going to have to do a little digging and maybe make some estimates.
And in North Carolina I know they don’t tell us the number of tickets printed so I’m going to show you how to do a quick estimate of that.

So most states you’re going to find some game information. And this is great for finding information. Here I can find it here on how to play and there’s a PDF and if I click that PDF it’s going to bring up some great information for me that we’re going to use. And I’m going to zoom in here for everybody.

And I can see here that we have, let’s see, a top prize of $2,000,000. And what we see is the top prize the odds of hitting it are 1 in 1,560,000.

I also see that there are four of those top prizes available. So I can do a simple calculation by multiplying those two numbers together and find out that they’re about 6,240,000 tickets printed for this game.

So again how that works out of those six million tickets about 1 in every 1.56 million is going to be a top prize. And since there’s four of them simply multiplying those two together gives us a quick estimate of how many tickets were printed.

So now that we know there was about 6.2 million tickets printed I’m going to put that to the side here and move on to our second step

So with our second step it’s super easy. We’re just going to add up how many claimers there are in this game. So we’re going to look at any prize it’s $500 or more and we’re going to add up how many any prizes are in the game.

And again we’re looking at starting information. At Lotto Edge if we take a look at it we’ll usually, we’ll be looking at the daily updates but here just for our quick calculation we’re looking at the start of a game.

So adding up that 6,240, 416, 156 on up, we’re going to find out this game has 6,904 claimers. And those are prizes that are $500 and up. And that’s all you have to do for step two.

So step three and the last step here is we’re simply going to divide our estimated tickets, the 6,240,000 tickets by the number of claimers we did in step two. So when we divide the 6,240,000 tickets by our 6,904 claimers we’re going to find out that the odds of hitting a claimer are about 1 in every 904 tickets.

That’s it! So about 1 in every 900 tickets we should expect to see a claimer hit in this game. And that’s all you have to do. It’s just simple math and it’s going to give you the odds to find a claimer.

So it’ll work for any state lottery any game. You just need to take a minute and look for the right stats so you can calculate it for yourself. For the states that we cover at Lotto Edge, we do this ranking for you. But if we don’t cover your state or you aren’t a pro member you can do this helpful calculation to give yourself an edge.

We hope you enjoyed the video and good luck.