Jackpot Odds vs Ticket Price, Across Every Game
We captured the official jackpot odds and ticket price for hundreds of games. Plotted together, they show how wildly "how hard, how much" varies.
Two facts about any lottery game frame everything else: how long the jackpot odds are, and what a ticket costs. PatternSight now captures both straight from the official game catalog, for hundreds of games. Plotting them together is revealing.
Each point is a game: x = ticket price, y = 1-in-N jackpot odds (log). Higher = longer odds.
Orders of magnitude apart
The y-axis is logarithmic because it has to be: jackpot odds range from a few thousand-to-one for small state games to roughly 1 in 292 million for Powerball. Ticket prices, meanwhile, cluster in a narrow band — mostly $1 to $3. The same few dollars buys radically different odds depending on the game.
Reading the cloud
Games toward the top of the chart have the longest odds — and, not coincidentally, the largest possible jackpots. Games toward the bottom pay smaller top prizes far more frequently. Neither is "better"; they are different products. What the chart gives you is the trade-off, laid out honestly, so you can see exactly what a given game is asking. PatternSight surfaces these official figures on every game page.