It's funny how a thread like this can actually spur something completely unexpected. After seeing the YouTube channel (which I had no idea existed) I noticed he is saying he is coming out with a book on "lottery strategy". PS: the commentors on that video are waiting with baited breath. So the unexpected part is I got curious about what possible "strategy" there could there be to randomly distributed tickets where you can't see what you are buying. So I took an hour or so and did a whole bunch of research on the net about scratch ticket strategy claims. I was skeptical, and I just needed to see how mathematically there could be anything... Well come to find out, it's a matter of obsessively tracking the odds. There IS an "edge" you can get with scratch tickets, IF you intimately involve yourself with the lottery corporation's prize payout reports. I knew there is nothing MD could put in a book that probably hasn't been tried a zillion times before, so I was right. All of this stuff was all over the net. Including YouTube videos that break down the math and show you. I won't get into the specifics, as you can all go watch that stuff yourself... but it comes down to something like this:

Tickets are issued on day 1, there may be 10 million $1 tickets printed. Five $1,000,000 prizes are randomly placed amongst those 10 million tickets. So OK - your odds of scratching one is 1 in 2 million.

But that's on day one, and day one only.

Here is where it gets interesting... fast forward to 5 months later:

Sometimes situations happen where a prize randomly holds out to near the very end. THIS is what the lottery enthusiasts study their stats for. So let's say the lottery's stats (published and must be public by law) show there are only 500,000 tickets left. But there is still one $1 million prize still unclaimed.

Now you have a decision: IF you have $500,000 to spend on tickets, you are guaranteed the million dollar winning ticket.

But it gets slightly weirder than that - the enthusiasts claim that the odds of buying the $1 million ticket as the very last ticket (when you're literally spending your 500,000th dollar) is actually a 1:500,000 odds... The way they look at it (as enthusiasts) is that somewhere well before that, the million dollar ticket will pop up. You're able to buy every ticket anyway, but if you do it sequentially, you may only have to outlay $250,000 to find that final ticket. Quadrupling your money. Plus they assume they are going to hit some of the $1000 & $5000 tickets in there as well, funding the buydown of the remaining tickets. Even if not, they still consider Worst case, buying 499,999 losers, and literally buying the winning ticket last - still doubling your money.

So they track the stats, watch the payouts, and try to keep a big bankroll going. It's winning by finding those special situations in the stats (and it happens all the time I'm sure, where one of the big prizes lingers to the last 5-10% of tickets) and sheer brute purchasing force.

Yeah, if you have the bankroll, the math works. I can see how the concept works. But there are factors working against you, that may screw up things horribly: The published lottery corp stats are almost always on a delay of 1-2 weeks. The amount of work is tremendous - as you have to somehow buy all the tickets... like what, 10,000 retailers across X states ? Sometimes this is why they stick to more "localized" ticket releases where there is a fixed territory. Plus I assume there are taxes to pay on winnings in the USA ? So while the math may make some sense in a "perfect storm" scenario of a small remaining amount of tickets and a huge buying budget, it sounds like a tough haul to make happen. Because underneath all this, Miss Random at the gas station that afternoon might just buy the million dollar ticket in ONE shot with $1 - and you won't know about it until a few days later when she has done her promo photo & video shoot.

Plus the biggest assumption of all: that you are the only one doing this ! Make this 2+ "strategy people" attacking the final buyout of all the tickets, and it's going to be a nightmare for all of them except one.