If you want to approach lottery play with the same legitimacy that you approach casino gambling, sports betting, or poker, you need to understand how to manage a lottery game bankroll. It is in many ways similar to managing any other budget, but unique in others. Let’s start with a look at what a lottery game is, in terms that players of other casino contests should easily understand. Every ticket, whether it’s based on a scheduled number draw or an instant-win scratch-off format, is an independent wager based on a single outcome. In many ways, that makes it similar to some slot machines, where every lotto ticket is like a single spin of the reels. That means things like buying more tickets don’t necessarily give you a better chance of winning, just more chances. Buying more tickets, in this analogy, means spinning the reels more times, which (also) requires an additional financial investment. It’s this distinction along with the way that lottery tickets are designed and distributed that make managing a lotto game bankroll a little unique. Here are some tips to help regular lottery players get more entertainment (and maybe more winnings) out of the money they set aside for lotto play.
Establish a Budget
This should be a no-brainer, but because lottery tickets are often marketed and made available as impulse purchases, it can be easy to spend a bit more or less than you have budgeted. Thankfully, lottery tickets tend to come at specific price points, which are essentially the cost-per-wager of the lottery world. That makes it a bit harder to establish a “unit bet size,” but a bit easier to set an overall budget. If instant-win lotto tickets in your area are available in denominations of $1, $5, and $10, then you are forced to choose from those wager sizes only. You can combine them in any way you want, provided they’re combined to a specific budgeted number, either per week, per month, or per year. An example would be setting a budget of $20 a week for lotto play, and breaking it up evenly among $5 and $1 tickets. This also gives the player some flexibility in terms of which tickets to buy, since often a larger number of low-denomination tickets are available, compared to the “high-roller” tickets at $20 apiece and even higher in some cases. How do you know which tickets to purchase? Learning lottery strategy is an art unto itself, and deserves its own article. Essentially, it is a process of determining which tickets still have large prizes unclaimed, and which are likely to pay out the budget-sustaining $50 and $100 smaller prizes that keep a lotto player in the game.
Estimating Potential Winnings
Managing a lotto bankroll means looking at how much you stand to win by playing. Obviously, prizes available on $1 tickets are going to be lower than those available on the $50 or $100 tickets found in some states. You have to spend more to win more. It should be no surprise that the prizes on those high-dollar tickets are also more common, meaning that once again (in case you missed it the first time) you have to spend more to win more. Establishing a weekly lotto budget of $20 means an overall annual outlay of $960. If you consistently play games with a break-even or better payout of 1 in 3, you should only expect to lose a few hundred dollars a year, and that’s barring the winning of a single prize larger than the cost of a ticket. In other words, some players will lose a little, some will win a lot, but smart bettors can increase their odds of winning at least a little bit. Part of that is basic lotto gambling strategy, but a big part is money management strategy.
Estimating Potential Losses
At the same time, it’s important to estimate how much you stand to lose. In the above example, we imagined a player wagering $960 a year on lotto games. While it’s extremely unlikely, lottery bettors should be aware that they stand to lose every cent of that $960. Luckily, they won’t lose more than they wager (since each bet is a fixed price, fixed-odds affair as settled at the shop that sells the ticket), but it is remotely possible that they could buy a year’s worth of losing tickets.
Doing Your Lotto Homework
Every serious lotto player has a responsibility to her money to do their homework when it comes to the lottery, and this applies whether the game is an instant-win title or based on a series of random numbers. Homework exists, even for a simple game like this, and it can greatly increase the likelihood of winning, even if the jackpots won are on the smaller side. Stats about the prizes still unclaimed on various scratch card games are often listed by their providers at centralized websites; sometimes this is done by the states that run the games. Either way, smart bettors can look at this information and pick only those games that still have a variety of worthwhile prizes available. Bettors of all stripes should be focusing on research, and just because lottery-based games are simplistic doesn’t mean they can’t be played with intelligence. Combine the common sense financial advice above with basic lotto-game strategy tactics and you’ll be well on your way to enjoying your scratchers and drawings even more, if not winning a little more often.