Scratch Cards


The traditional game of scratch cards was invented in America in the early 20th century. They quickly rose to fame and after conquering the American public spread all over the world. Soon, every lottery store offered scratch cards in all parts of the planet.

Scratch cards are mostly sold in convenience stores for relatively low amounts of money. Most commonly they do not offer really large payouts but some scratch cards promise attractive winnings in the form of jackpots.

Real life convenience store scratch card games are mostly created and maintained by national lotteries. However, in some countries where the government privatized the gaming sector scratch cards are also sold by private companies.

Online Scratch Card Gameplay

Scratch cards can also be played over the internet at special online gaming websites. At first this idea might sound counter intuitive to some people because scratch cards appear to be games that could only be played in real life with actual paper cards.

In reality it's very simple to play scratch cards over the internet. All it takes is a random number generator and great visual effects that depict typical real life scratch cards. All of these are possible for a very long time now. Online scratch cards are very popular these days and can be found at virtually every online gaming site https://freespinscasino.org/no-deposit-casinos-usa-list.

How do they work?

As we hinted above, online scratch card games are driven by so-called random number generators. These random number generators are responsible for generating the results of scratch card games. Basically what they do is they create a sequence of random numbers.

Each of the numbers that is generated corresponds to a certain outcome of a game, in this case, to the symbol pattern present on a scratch card. Numbers are being generated every micro second. The result of a game will be decided based on the number that was "hit" during the exact moment the player pressed the "Buy" button on an online scratch card.

We really don't want to go into a lot of complicated technical details. However, what's certain is that random number generators are extremely efficient in replicating the winning odds present in real life paper scratch cards sold by lotteries. In fact, they are able to replicate the exact same odds without any difference whatsoever.

What about the visual aspect?

The visual part of an online scratch card game is generated by the gaming software employed by the respective online casino. In each case the visuals were developed in the way to accurately reflect real life paper scratch card gameplay.

What we mean is that online scratch cards also require players to scratch off a market area on a card in order to discover a winning pattern. In the case of online scratch cards, players will have to use the mouse cursor to scratch off the marked fields on a virtual card.

Odds and Winning Probabilities in Online Scratch Cards

As we said above, online scratch cards are able to replicate the odds promised by real life scratch card providers such as lotteries. In reality, online casinos most commonly don't provide the same scratch cards winning odds as real life lotteries. But this is a good thing.

Online scratch card games provide much better winning chances than real live scratch cards. This is because it costs less money to create and deliver a virtual scratch card to the player than in real life. In fact, there are no expenses associated with generating games of scratch cards online. If you want to play casino game and want to know its safe or not? So you can read our online casinos reviews.

In real life, however, lotteries will have to pay money on expenses such as printing, packaging and delivering. They also have to pay a salary to the lottery shop clerks and will have other related expenses. Over the internet players can just generate scratch cards at will; it costs no money for the casino.

As such, online casinos can permit themselves to offer better winning odds and pay out more money to players than real life lotteries. Online casinos also have to compete against each other and as such constantly strive towards offering better payouts to players. In contrast, real life lotteries most of the time don't have any competitors on the market.

Online Scratch Card Jackpots

Some online scratch cards apart from normal payouts also offer huge progressive jackpots. To some people large jackpots might seem very suspicious. "Why would a casino want to pay out several millions of dollars in jackpots? …and where does this money come from?"

In reality this is very simple. The money that's at stake in a jackpot has been generated by players themselves. Each time a player purchases a jackpot scratch card, a part of the fee paid for the card will be added to the jackpot prize pool.

Most online casinos are interlinked with each other. This means that the prize pool of a certain jackpot is built by multiple thousands of players all over the globe. This is why most scratch card jackpots grow very fast and offer such big prizes.

How to hit scratch card jackpots?

There are various ways how a scratch card jackpot can be hit. These depend on the casino at hand as well as the rules of a scratch card in question. In most cases a jackpot can be hit by discovering a certain symbol pattern on a scratch card. This pattern will be communicated to the player in advance by the casino.

Scratch card jackpots can also be hit on random occasions without having to discover a certain symbol pattern. These scratch card jackpots are obviously only available in the online form of the game. Another thing to remember is that jackpot scratch cards usually cost more than regular scratch cards.