For Six Straight Days, Our Model Said Buy This $30 Ticket. Then Someone Hit It for $10 Million.

Somewhere in New York, a scratch-off player is holding a ticket worth $10 million.

On Wednesday, the state's official prize data confirmed that one of the four grand prizes on 300X THE MONEY — the $30 game with the biggest jackpot on the New York board — had been claimed. The prize pays $500,000 a year for 20 years. Three grand prizes remain.

We did not know it was coming. Nobody did; that is the nature of a scratch-off. But here is what we did know, and published, every single day beforehand: for six consecutive days leading into the claim, our Smart Score model ranked 300X THE MONEY first or second among all 60-plus active New York scratch-off games. Not buried in a tier table. At the top of the front page.

The Receipts

Every day, before the market opens on whatever luck New York is selling, we publish a ranked list of every active scratch-off game. The ranks are archived the moment they go up — which means they cannot be rewritten after the fact. Here is the full run for 300X THE MONEY:

Why the Model Liked It

Smart Score does not predict winning tickets. No one can; the winners were locked in at the printing plant before a single pack shipped. What it measures is which game offers the most remaining value for the next dollar spent — and by early June, 300X stood out for a simple reason: all four of its $10 million prizes were still unclaimed deep into the game's life.

Every ticket sold without a grand prize claimed concentrates the remaining jackpots into a smaller unsold pool. The model watches that concentration — along with prize depletion across the smaller tiers, claim velocity, and how fast the game is selling — and it kept arriving at the same conclusion six mornings in a row: if you are buying a $30 ticket in New York this week, this is the one.

Then somebody, somewhere in the state, bought the right one.

Third Time This Spring

This is not the first time the pattern has played out in public view. Twice in May, a game sitting at or near the top of our rankings gave up a top prize within days:

• 100Xtra spent two weeks in our top 7 — #1 on eight of those days — before its $250,000-a-year top prize was claimed May 28
• $10,000 A Week For Life was our #1 pick four of the eight days before its top prize hit on May 16
• Pot of Gold led its price tier before the $500,000 claim on May 23

Three top-prize claims in four weeks, each preceded by days of published top-of-board rankings. We will keep posting the receipts either way — including the windows where the model is wrong.

What This Does Not Mean

Check Our Work

Everything in this story is independently verifiable. The claim itself appears in the New York Lottery's public prize records, which report every top-prize claim by game and date. Our side of the ledger is just as public: the live rankings update daily, the historical calendar on that page shows exactly what we published on any past date, and the methodology page documents the model's full track record — hits and misses alike.

Related Articles

• Smart Score Called the 100Xtra Top Prize
• Smart Score Called the $10,000 a Week for Life Top Prize
• Smart Score Called Pot of Gold Before the $500,000 Claim
• NY Scratch-Offs Running Out of Top Prizes (Hazard Model)
• Best $30 Scratch-Offs in NY

Data sourced from the official New York Lottery prize reports at nylottery.ny.gov. All ranks and scores in this article are exactly as published on the day shown. For entertainment and informational purposes only. Please play responsibly.