Avoid These 7 Texas Lottery Scratch Offs If You Want To Win Big

The odds of winning the top prize (greater than $100K) in any Texas Lottery Scratch-Off game is between 1 in 1.25 million and 1 in 2.5 million. That boils down to about a .00005 percent chance of hitting the jackpot.

Those odds are based on the total number of tickets distributed for a game against the total number of its top prizes. Let's choose a Texas Lottery Scratch-Off game as an example.

200X Scratch-Off Game

This is a $10 ticket featuring five top prizes of $250,000.

According to the Texas Lottery website data, there are approximately 8,197,300 game tickets in 200X. Your odds of winning one of those top prizes is 1 in 1.608 million, or around .000062 percent. Those are the odds based on when the game cards were first distributed.

Using the Updated Texas Lottery Data

By taking a look at the number of prizes claimed for the lower tier prizes of this game ($10/$20 payouts), it can be estimated that 72% of this game's tickets have been purchased, while 80% of the top prizes have been claimed.

That means around 2.3 million tickets remain for this game with only one jackpot prize left. That's a 1 in 2.3 million chance or .000043 percent -- quite a bit worse than the original slim chances of winning.

There are four secondary prizes of $10,000 with this game, and ALL have been claimed. The above data shows this game ticket is one to avoid if you're hoping to land the big payouts.

What About Scratch-Off Games That You SHOULD Buy?

I'm glad you asked.

I did a story at the beginning of October that pointed out the 10 Texas Lottery Scratch-Off Games you should buy for the best chances of winning the jackpots...see those 10 games here.

Keep in mind, no matter which game you play, your chances of winning the top payout will still be minuscule, I'm just letting you know which ones now have the best odds as compared to the original odds when the games were first distributed.

The 7 Scratch-Off Games to Avoid (current as of October 31)

After digging into the data, here are the 7 games to steer clear of...that is, if you want a better chance to win the big jackpots.