About Bits & Odds
Bits & Odds publishes free, independent analysis of publicly released lottery data. Every number on this site is computed from figures the state lotteries publish themselves, recomputed every day, with the formulas written down.
What we actually do
Every state lottery publishes how many prizes each scratcher started with and how many are left. Almost nobody reads it, because it is buried, inconsistent between states, and meaningless without arithmetic. We read all of it, every day, for 17 states and 1,157 games on sale, and turn it into the only question worth asking: how much of a dollar comes back on this ticket, right now.
For draw games — Powerball, Mega Millions and the state games of California, Georgia, Michigan, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania and Texas — we do the same with the draw histories: how often every number has come up, how that compares with what it should be, and what a ticket is actually worth.
That is 19 states in all: some for scratchers, some for winning numbers, most for both. Which ones, and what we hold for each.
How to check us
- Methodology — every formula, including the ones with known weaknesses, and what those weaknesses are.
- Sources — the official page or feed behind every state and every game, when it was last read, and a list of every place where two official sources disagreed with each other.
Draw results are cross-checked against several independent official feeds before publication. That is not a formality: New York’s open-data feed is missing six Powerball draws, including the record $2.04 billion drawing, and publishes two Mega Millions draws with the wrong numbers. All of it is listed on the sources page.
What we will not do
Nothing here is paywalled. Several sites in this niche charge for the metric that matters most; ours are all free, and we intend to keep it that way.
We do not sell tickets, take bets, or run affiliate deals with lotteries. We are not affiliated with any state lottery.
We do not claim to beat the lottery. We publish which tickets return more than others — not a system, not a prediction, and no suggestion that a number is ever “due”. Where the honest answer to a popular question is that a pattern is not real, we say that, and show the working. Every game on this site has a negative expected value; that is what a lottery is.
Who publishes this
Bits & Odds is published by Voitto Virta LLC. The site began in 2019 as a spreadsheet tracking California scratcher odds and is now an automated pipeline that reads the official sources every day and rebuilds the site from them.
Media and data enquiries, corrections, or a state you would like added: get in touch. If a figure here disagrees with the official lottery page, the official page is right and we want to know.
Some reading we like
The stories that got us interested in the first place: Jerry and Marge Selbee, a retired couple who found a positive-expectation window in the Michigan lottery and played it legally for years, and the MIT Blackjack Team. On risk and decision-making generally, Nate Silver’s On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything is worth the time.
That book link is an Amazon affiliate link: if you buy through it we may earn a commission, at no cost to you. It does not affect anything we publish, and it is the only affiliate link on the site.
Play for entertainment. If gambling stops being entertainment, the National Problem Gambling Helpline is 1-800-522-4700, free and confidential, 24 hours a day.