Have you ever purchased a NC Lottery Scratch off ticket, only later to find out all the top prizes were gone?
Us too! It happens everyday. Unsuspecting scratch off players buy tickets where the prizes, they hope to hit, have already been claimed.
The number of NC Lottery scratch off remaining prizes changes each day. As players redeem winning tickets, the North Carolina lottery updates the remaining prize count for each prize on its website.
The information the NC Lottery gives isn’t all that helpful though. You still have to click through each game to find the right game to play.
Additionally, a quick check on the North Carolina Education Lottery website and you’ll see the total of the remaining prizes isn’t disclosed. It is left to players to add up all the remaining prizes to find the games with the most prize money remaining.
While each scratch off player has their own strategy to find winning tickets, no one wants to buy a ticket when they prize that want is already gone.
At Lotto Edge, we wanted to solve this problem. So we created a few tools to help scratcher players find the instant games with the remaining prizes they want to win.
This first tool is part of our Free access and open to all players.
This strategy ranks the Total Amount of Remaining (Unclaimed) Prizes for all NC Lottery Scratch off games. Each game is updated daily, the same as the NC website.
Even better, you can filter the results to only see the ticket prices you actually play. Want to only see $5 scratch offs? Just check the box and click Filter.
But we didn’t stop there. Clicking on the name of any instant scratch game brings up a full listing of all prizes and the number of prizes remaining for each.
Comparing instant tickets is as easy as clicking the yellow arrows to advance to the next game.
Now we know some players want even more powerful data and they want it lightning fast. That is why we have advanced filtering strategies for our Premium Members.
One of those Premium strategies is the Percentage of Prize Amounts Remaining. This strategy lets players see what percentage of the total prize pool is still available.
It’s great for finding the games with the highest percentage of the prize pool still up for grabs.
Also available for Premium Members is the​ Total Amount of Grand Prizes Remaining. This strategy ranks games by the total amount of all grand prizes left unclaimed.
Clicking on the name of any game brings up the stats on the number of grand prizes remaining as well as the estimated current odds of winning one of those prizes.
Our next Premium Strategy, Grand Prizes Remaining, tells you the number of grand prizes still remaining.
Find those overlooked games with lots of top prizes still available.
The next Premium strategy is our No Grand Prizes Remaining. This strategy instantly tells you the games where all the top prizes have been claimed.
You’ll know the tickets to avoid if you are hunting for that elusive top prize.
We’ve already established you wouldn’t buy a ticket if the prize you wanted was already gone. But would you buy a scratcher if the top prize were just claimed yesterday or maybe a week ago?
What are the chances of hitting it again today? ZERO.
That’s why we created our final remaining prize strategy, Grand Prize Claimed Recently, where we list how many days since the last time the top prize was claimed.
If the game you were thinking of playing just had a top prize claim, you might consider playing another scratcher. (HINT – we have strategies to help you find those overdue scratch off prizes too!)
Something I would like information on would be what if you are sure you have a winning ticket but the ticket got wet and you scratched off part of the bar code plus the numbers used to manually check the ticket, is there another way to find out for sure that it is a winner and still be able to get paid for it?
Hi Daniel,
Great question. You would have to contact the NC Lottery directly to see if they could help. However, it seems like they should be able to validate the ticket in some way. Best of luck!