Buying a Brick of scratchers is not the answer

A few days ago, I heard about a trend online of buying whole rolls of lotto scratchers. I do not have any social media or watch TikTok, and yet I still hear about trends from time to time. I was intrigued and confused because I have done this trend before it was a trend online. I didn't invent this trend because I have seen others before me do it. Most liquor stores have a guy that goes in there and buys bricks and scratches for hours. I always assume those guys got a big government check due to a head injury on the job. They live in squalor but don't mind and buy scratchers every day while surviving on a diet of cigarettes, plastic bottle vodka, and pills. I'm not judging; they are doing their best with the cards they have been dealt, and who knows, maybe they figured life out and I am in the wrong. I call whole rolls of scratchers "bricks" or "buying in bulk." Bricks is my preferred term, so I will use that for the remainder of this blog. The trend online said buying a brick of scratchers will contain a major winning ticket within the brick to cover the cost of the brick. I knew right away that this was not the case, and in my experience, there was not a major winner, and I did not even make half the money back every time. A typical brick I would buy was a brick of thirty-dollar scratchers costing nine hundred bucks. Buying bricks can be a challenge as well. The cashier will give you a look up and down with a scowl as if you are punking him as a joke. Then you have to take out a huge roll of hundreds, which is too much money to bring into a liquor store in the first place. If the cashier has never seen you, they immediately think you are paying with fake money and deny me—I mean you—the first time I tried—I mean you try. The thirty-dollar scratchers are numbered zero to twenty-nine. I not only did not get a big winning ticket, I did not get any multipliers. They were mainly free tickets or thirty-dollar tickets. I paid nine hundred and won three to four hundred back. It is not the answer. The biggest winners I ever got were just buying maybe two of the same ticket in a row or buying a bunch of different ones. Another thing a few cashiers have told me that sounds good but is bullshit was if you got a scratcher that was really white on the serrated part where the scratchers are torn from each other. The buying of a brick proved that theory false. I saw a bunch of those tickets, and they were not winners. A tip that I have noticed is the number of the scratcher at the bottom are even or odd and where it is in the roll. Most liquor stores have a wall of fame, and if you look at them, the winning tickets are even or odd and are a certain color. Look for the most current tickets sold on the wall and see what numbers are. In my experience, the blue-colored even tickets are up there, and the red odd tickets are up there. The even or odd numbers and colors of the ticket may vary, and there are a few outliers, but they tend to match. So look at the wall of fame and see the number, and if it's even and you buy one, it's odd; buy another one. I tend to at least buy two of the same tickets each time. I also prefer tickets numbered 5-15. The end of the roll tickets I have barely won. If you are a numbers guy, remember there is a zero ticket, so typically scratcher 1 is the second ticket, so odds are even and evens are odds if that makes sense, which it doesn't because there is no rhyme or reason to buying winning scratchers.