So me and my pal McGon in work have been playing scratch cards for months now, regularly buying the €1 all cash’s. Ive bought around 100, but have won around 120 over the time, so ive been lucky.
We had always wondered what the kind of stats were for the cards so with journalistic intent and a keenly plucked eyebrow, McGon shot off a mail to the National Lottery asking for Statistics.
Much to our surprise, they emailed back the next day, with the information that we asked for, they have to give out the details in Per Million tickets, because clearly if you could know how many were in each roll of 300 you could adapt your buying habit. Here’s the stats below.
All Cash – €1
| Prize | Number per 1 million tickets |
| Free €1 Ticket | 55,000 |
| €2 | 119,500 |
| €4 | 19,500 |
| €8 | 6,000 |
| €25 | 5,000 |
| €50 | 800 |
| €500 | 16 |
| €5000 | 2 |
All Cash Gold – €2
| Prize | Number per 1 million tickets |
| Free €2 Ticket | 89,000 |
| €4 | 117,000 |
| €5 | 34,000 |
| €8 | 8,000 |
| €10 | 6,000 |
| €25 | 10,000 |
| €40 | 80 |
| €50 | 60 |
| €80 | 40 |
| €100 | 20 |
| €250 | 10 |
| €1000 | 4 |
| €10,000 | 1 |
€1 Analysis
So thats the stats for these scratch cards, lets break it down a bit. you have a 1 in 500,000 chance of winning 5 grand on the 1 euro card. Where as 1 in 8.37 cards will render you a €2 card.
If you take that in 1 million cards, 205,818 cards are winners, 794,182 are losers. so with any card you only have a 20.58% chance of winning. of that 20.58% chance of winning, 17.4% of that will be a €2 or a free card.
So you only have a 3.18% chance of winning €4 and higher, if you remove the €4 and €8 to money which might be worth winning from €25 upwards you have a 0.63% chance of winning good money on the €1 cards.
Lets see if the €2’s weigh up any better
€2 Analysis
Ok so lets see how we compare if we pay twice as much, do we get twice the chance to win or is it literally just doubling the output money with the same stats
Winning cards = 264,215 out of 1 million
so Losing Cards = 735,785
So straight up there are less losers on the €2 cards, 58,397 more winning cards per million on the €2 cards. this makes for out of 1 million you have 26.4% chance of winning. an increase of 6.02% chance of winning overall
if we take the €25 and upwards acid test again you have 10,215 cards of €25 or higher so you have a 1.02% chance of winning fun money. an increase of 0.39% chance of winning.
So it seems you dont quite double your chances of winning but they DEFINITELY increase playing the more expensive cards.
How much of a gambler are you?
excellent break down and analysis there Cuffe!
hey cuffe,just to let u know i witnessed one of those €1 scratch cards pay out €5000,a weeks of weeks before christmas,,a mate of mine bought one scratched it won €2 and got another two,scratched them and won the jackpot…….