Those who buy scratch cards tend to look first at the price of the ticket or the value of the maximum prize, but the most useful question is another: which scratch card gives the best chance of winning any prize. Santa Casa’s official plans allow this comparison to be made and show that the answer does not just depend on face value, although the lowest priced games appear several times among the most favorable.
In the official documents consulted, the most favorable probability found was that of the games “Mina de Ouro” and “Pé-De-Meia”, of 1 euro, which indicates a probability of winning “any prize” of 1 in 3.18 tickets. This means that, within this set of games analyzed, it is this scratch card that appears at the top when the comparison is made only by the frequency with which a prize is won. The game “10X” also appears among the leaders, with a probability of 1 in 3.19 tickets.
Still, the data itself shows that it is not enough to look at the price and conclude that all 1 euro scratch cards are automatically the best. The “Mini Pé-De-Meia”, also worth R$1, has a probability of 1 in 3.33, while the “Lucky Clover”, also worth R$1, is 1 in 3.27. In other words, within the same price there are real differences between titles.
Closest to first place
Right behind the most competitive R$1 scratch card, the “Mega Pé-de-Meia” appears in these consulted data, worth R$10, with a probability of 1 in 3.24. In the same group of the most competitive there is also the “Joker”, of 2 euros, with 1 in 3.28, and the “Super Pé-de-Meia”, of 5 euros, with 1 in 3.31.
These numbers show that the distance between various games is short and that there are scratch cards of different prices very close to each other when the analysis focuses only on the chance of winning any prize.
The case of 2 euro scratch cards is particularly illustrative. “Joker” has 1 prize in every 3.28 tickets, but “Jardim da Sorte” drops to 1 in 4.04 and “Catch the Prizes” goes even further, to 1 in 4.50. This shows that the name of the game and its prize plan weigh more than the simple price printed on the ticket.
Where are the 3 and 5 euro ones?
In the official games of intermediate value consulted, the “Reward”, of R$3, has a probability of 1 in 3.70, while the “Super Reward”, of R$5, is 1 in 3.65. These are less competitive probabilities than those observed in the games that lead this comparison, according to the data consulted.
At the same time, these same plans confirm that all these analyzed games allocate 70% of the issued capital to prizes. This is important because it shows that the probability of winning and the theoretical return are not exactly the same thing. A scratch card may award prizes more frequently and, even so, concentrate this winning in smaller amounts, while another may prize prizes less often, but with higher average values.
Reading official documents
What the Santa Casa documents show is not that R$1 scratch cards are always the best by definition, but that some R$1 titles are among the strongest in this criterion and that one of them actually leads the group analyzed.
Therefore, the safest and most faithful formulation to the official data is this: among the games compared, the scratch card most likely to give a prize is R$1, but the advantage always depends on the specific game and not just the price.
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