How Fast Play works,
and what to look at

1. It's a scratcher without the scratching

You buy a Fast Play ticket at the counter or a lottery machine. It prints on the spot and tells you right away if you won. No drawing, no waiting.

Here's the part that matters: the machine is not rolling dice. Every Fast Play game is a set number of tickets, with a set number of winners already decided. When you buy one, you get the next ticket from that set. It works just like a roll of scratchers, only printed instead of scratched.

That means the lottery knows how many prizes are left in every game, and it publishes those numbers. We read them twice a day.

2. Some games have a jackpot that grows

Some Maryland Fast Play games have a progressive jackpot. It keeps growing until somebody wins it, then starts over. Each jackpot belongs to one game. Only tickets sold on that game add to it. The other games have a fixed top prize that never changes.

The lottery updates jackpot amounts through the day, so the amount printed on a ticket may be a little higher than what you see here.

3. Every game has its own odds

Two games at the same price can have very different jackpots and very different odds of winning them.

Each game has its own set of tickets, and only a few of those tickets are jackpot winners. A game with fewer tickets left, or more jackpot tickets left, gives better odds. Those numbers change as tickets sell.

Nothing on the ticket or the machine tells you this. It is the main reason we built these pages.

4. A game can run out of jackpot tickets

Each jackpot game only has a set number of jackpot tickets. When they have all been won, that game has no jackpot left to win, even if it still sells tickets. The same goes for a fixed top prize.

Every Maryland Fast Play jackpot game still has at least one jackpot ticket today. We flag it on the game's page the moment one runs out.

5. Much of a game's value can be tied up in the jackpot

We work out what a game pays back for every $1 played, averaged over every ticket left. Part of that average sits in regular prizes. The rest is tied up in the jackpot.

That second part is easy to misread. A ticket that wins the jackpot pays the whole jackpot. But there are only a few of those tickets, so when the jackpot is averaged over every ticket in the game, it adds only a small amount to each one. Nearly every ticket sees none of it.

A game can have several jackpot tickets left, but the jackpot starts over each time it is won. So we count one jackpot at today's amount and the rest at the amount the jackpot starts over at. Until we have seen a jackpot start over, we do not count the rest at all.

A game with most of its value tied up in the jackpot can look great on paper and still pay little, ticket after ticket. Neither number is wrong. They answer different questions.

What to look at before you pick

1. How big is the jackpot? The more it has grown, the more each $1 pays back on average.
2. What are the odds of winning it? If you are playing for a jackpot, compare the odds as well as the amount. They differ a lot from game to game.
3. Does the game still have jackpot tickets? If not, that jackpot is out of reach on that game.
4. How much of the value is tied up in the jackpot? If you just want regular wins, look at what the regular prizes pay on their own.
5. What's the score? The SmartScratcher Score rolls all of it into one number from 0 to 100.

What these numbers can't do