1. It's a scratcher you open instead of scratch
A pull tab is a paper ticket with tabs you tear open. Michigan Lottery pull tabs are sold at bars, restaurants and other places licensed to sell Lottery products. You find out right away if you won.
Here's the part that matters: each game is a set number of tickets, with a set number of winners already decided. It works just like a scratcher. The lottery knows how many prizes are left in every game, and it publishes those numbers. We read them twice a day.
2. The top prizes run out, and the game keeps selling
Each game starts with only a few top prizes. Once they have all been won, the game stays on sale until its tickets run out. The ticket still shows the top prize, but nobody can win it anymore.
26 of the 46 Michigan pull tab games have no top prize left today. One of them is $30,000 Thrill: every $30,000 prize has been won, and the biggest prize still unclaimed is $200.
3. Two games at the same price can pay very differently
We work out what a game pays back for every $1 played, averaged over every ticket still unsold. A new game has all of its prizes. A game that has lost its big prizes pays back less, because what is left is mostly small prizes.
One Nightstand and Detroit Lions Multiplier are both $1 pull tab games.
One Nightstand pays back about 71¢ for every $1 played. Detroit Lions Multiplier pays back about 43¢.
Nothing on the ticket tells you this. It is the main reason we built these pages.
What to look at before you pick
- Is the top prize still there? If every top prize has been won, the biggest prize the game can still pay is smaller than the ticket says.
- How much comes back per $1? This is the average over every ticket still unsold. Higher is better.
- How many tickets are left? A game that is nearly sold out can be hard to find, and what is left is mostly small prizes.
- What's the score? The SmartScratcher Score rolls all of it into one number from 0 to 100.
What these numbers can't do
They can't tell you which ticket wins. Nobody can. The numbers show which games have more left in them, not what the next ticket will be.
They are for the whole state. The counts show what is left in a game across Michigan. They cannot tell you what is left in the tickets at one location.
Every game pays back less than it takes in. That is how a lottery works. A better game loses less on average. It is still a game, so play for fun and only with money you can spare.