9 Texas Lottery Stocking Stuffers With The Best Odds to Win Big

Texas Lottery scratch-off tickets are a common stocking stuffer. Every year, I purchase a few for friends and family and always find several in my stocking.

One Christmas, I won $10 off a single gifted ticket, but the only money I usually get from game tickets is the nickel I use to scratch them.

Which Scratch-Off Tickets Do I Usually Buy?

In years past, I've used one main basis to decide which tickets to purchase...the appearance.

Blue is my favorite color, so blue scratch-off tickets are usually my first choice. I like large graphics, too, mainly because my eyesight is not what it used to be.

That's been the extent of which tickets I pick, but this year, I decided to put my nerdiness to work.

Using Math to Choose Which Scratch-Off Tickets To Buy

I'm a math and weather nerd, one of these will help when picking scratch-off tickets that tilt the odds slightly in my favor.

I checked the current data on the Texas Lottery Scratch-Off Page (as of December 7), and crunched some numbers to find which games have the best chances to win the big payouts.

There are 9 games that have significantly increased odds of winning big payouts as compared to their posted odds when the games were first introduced. The odds of winning big with some of those games have increased by over 100%.

Methodology

It's probably easiest to show the methodology by using an example. Let's take the Big Winnings Scratch-Off Game. This $5 ticket features four top prizes of $200,000, one of which has been claimed.

According to the Texas Lottery website, around 58.3% of the lowest-tier prizes have been won. One can also assume that around 58.3% of the game's overall tickets have been purchased.

Skipping a few steps, that means approximately 3,008,800 tickets remain in the game. Your chance of winning one of those remaining $200K payouts is 1 in 1,002,933. When the game was first introduced in July, the odds of winning one of the top payouts was 1 in 1,770,000.

That means the odds of winning the top jackpot have increased by 76%. The odds of winning now are very slim, but they were slimmer several months ago. And, if you're going to spend $5 on a lottery ticket, you might as well purchase a ticket that gives you a better chance of winning.

So, if you're buying scratch-off tickets as stocking stuffers, these 9 games will give you some of the better chances to win the top-tier jackpots.