There is a scratch game in Missouri called $5,000,000 Fortune. It costs $50. Printed on the front is the five-million-dollar prize it is named after. Three of those prizes were ever printed, and all three have already been claimed — while roughly four in ten of the tickets are still out there to be bought, at full price, advertising a prize that no longer exists.
That is not a scandal. It is not even unusual. We checked every scratch game on sale in 22 state lotteries — 1,595 games — against each state's own published prize data. 180 of them had zero top prizes remaining. That's about one game in nine.
What "no top prize left" actually means
Every state lottery publishes, for each game, how many of each prize were printed and how many are still unclaimed. When the top tier reads zero unclaimed, every one of those prizes has been won and paid. The game keeps selling anyway, because scratch games run until they sell out or hit a scheduled end date — not until their headline prize is gone.
Added up, the top prizes on those 180 games were advertised at $124.6 million in total. Every dollar of it has already been claimed by someone else.
The obvious objection is that these must be end-of-life games, nearly sold out, where you'd expect the prizes to be gone. Some are. But 129 of the 180 — more than two thirds — are not. They still have a substantial share of their print run unsold. Here are some of the starkest, all verified against the states' own current figures:
| Game | State | Price | Advertised top prize | Sold |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| $5,000,000 Fortune | Missouri | $50 | $5,000,000 — none left | 58% |
| 200X Cash Blitz | New Jersey | $30 | $2,409,200 — none left | 68% |
| 40th Anniversary | Missouri | $20 | $2,000,000 — none left | 62% |
| $2,000,000 Maximum Multiplier | Illinois | $20 | $1,200,000 — none left | 68% |
| Gold Rush | Missouri | $10 | $1,000,000 — none left | 69% |
| Colossal Crossword | New Jersey | $30 | $600,000 — none left | 66% |
Missouri's 40th Anniversary game is the cleanest illustration. Two top prizes of $2,000,000 were printed. Both are claimed. The game is 62% sold, so around 38% of its tickets remain — every one of them still carrying "$2,000,000" on the front, still costing $20.
How common is it where you live?
The share varies a lot by state, mostly reflecting how long games are left on the rack after launch.
| State | Games with no top prize left | Share of catalogue |
|---|---|---|
| South Carolina | 15 of 59 | 25% |
| New Jersey | 30 of 123 | 24% |
| Georgia | 34 of 165 | 21% |
| Florida | 16 of 84 | 19% |
| New York | 21 of 111 | 19% |
| Missouri | 14 of 78 | 18% |
| Virginia | 12 of 83 | 14% |
| Connecticut | 9 of 70 | 13% |
| Massachusetts | 7 of 64 | 11% |
These are a snapshot, and they move. A state that retires games briskly after their top prizes go will score lower; one that lets games run to the end of their print run will score higher. That is a policy choice, not a measure of honesty.
The one number in scratch data you can fully trust
We are usually careful to warn that "unclaimed" is not the same as "unsold." A prize counted as remaining might already be sitting in a ticket somebody bought and hasn't scratched, or has scratched and not yet cashed. So a game showing three top prizes left is not a promise that three are still on a shelf somewhere. Several states — Maryland, Michigan and Indiana among them — print that caveat themselves.
But notice which way that uncertainty runs. It means a game showing prizes remaining might have fewer available than it appears. It cannot mean a game showing zero remaining secretly has some. If every top prize has been claimed, they are gone, definitively.
That makes "no top prize left" the single most reliable fact in the whole dataset — and, not coincidentally, the most useful one. Everything else we compute is an estimate with caveats attached. This one is just true.
Why nobody tells you at the till
No law requires a retailer to know, or a ticket to say. The prize data is public — every state in this analysis publishes it, some updating daily — but it lives on a lottery website, several clicks down, in a table. It is not on the ticket, not on the dispenser, and not on the receipt.
So the information asymmetry is not that the data is hidden. It is that the data is published somewhere you were never going to look, while the prize you're chasing is printed in large type on the thing in your hand. Nothing about the ticket changes when its top prize is claimed: same art, same price, same headline number.
What to actually do about it
The practical advice is narrow, and we want to keep it honest.
Checking whether a game still has its top prize does not make that game a good bet. Every scratch game returns less than it costs across all players — typically 60 to 80 cents on the dollar, as we found across 1,275 games in 18 states. Avoiding a hollowed-out game moves you from a bad deal to a slightly less bad one. It does not move you to a good one, and no amount of checking will.
What it does do is stop you paying full price for a prize that cannot be won. If you are going to buy a scratch ticket anyway — and plenty of people will, for entertainment, which is the only sensible reason to — then thirty seconds of looking is the difference between chasing a prize that exists and chasing one that doesn't.
We publish the numbers for 22 states, refreshed daily: which games still have their top prizes, how much of the prize money is genuinely left, and what each game returns per dollar today rather than at launch.
How we checked
Figures come from each state lottery's own published prize tables — for every tier of every game, the number printed and the number still unclaimed. A game counts as having no top prize left when the highest-value tier shows zero unclaimed. The $124.6 million total is the sum of those advertised top-prize values; where a prize is paid as an annuity we use the published cash value rather than the advertised total of all payments.
The individual games named above were re-checked against the live state pages at the time of writing. Because this data changes daily as prizes are claimed and games launch and retire, the counts here are a snapshot — the state pages carry the current figures. Full detail on our methodology page.
Derived from state lotteries' published prize data — not official guidance, and not a recommendation to buy any game. Figures are a snapshot and change daily. Scratch tickets are negative-expected-value by design: every game described here returns less than it costs across all players, whether or not its top prize remains. For information and entertainment only — not financial or gambling advice. You must be 18+ to play (21+ in some states). If gambling is a problem for you or someone you know, call 1-800-GAMBLER (1-800-426-2537).