How We Score

The True Odds Score rates how much winning chance your money actually buys. It runs from 0 to 100, and higher is better. It is not a rating of the prize, and it is not a rating of the operator. It will not tell you whether you will win.

Why advertised odds mislead

A competition with 5,000 tickets advertises odds of 1 in 5,000. That assumes every ticket sells. Most do not. If the operator draws once 2,000 tickets have gone, your real odds on the day were 1 in 2,000. Better than advertised, and nothing on the page told you so.

We track competitions from the day they are listed to the day they are drawn, so we can use what an operator actually does rather than what the ticket count claims.

The draw adjustment

For every operator we take their competitions drawn in the last 180 days and find the median share of tickets sold when the competition closed.

• We use the median rather than the average. One sold-out headline draw should not flatter an operator whose typical competition draws at a third sold.
• We want at least 5 drawn competitions before we will say anything about an operator.
• If we have not seen enough of an operator yet, they get no adjustment. Being new to us is never held against them.
• The adjustment is capped. However low an operator's median runs, we never treat a competition as smaller than a tenth of its ticket count.

The calculation

1. Take the ticket total and scale it by that operator's typical draw point. A 5,000-ticket competition from an operator who usually draws at 40% is really a 2,000-ticket competition.
2. Work out what a 1% chance of winning costs at that adjusted size. That is the ticket price multiplied by the adjusted ticket count, divided by 100. Cheaper is better.
3. Rank that cost against every other scoreable competition live on PrizeOn, then turn the ranking into a score out of 100.

What the score is relative to

The score is a ranking against what is live right now, not a fixed measurement. A score of 80 means this competition offers better value per 1% chance than about 80% of what is currently listed. We rank instead of using a fixed scale because one competition with a very high ticket price would otherwise squash everything ordinary into the bottom of the range, which tells you nothing.

The trade-off is that a score can move even when the competition itself has not, because the field around it has. We recalculate every 30 minutes.

What the bands mean

The badge on a competition shows its score and the band it falls in. Because scores are a ranking, each band holds roughly a fifth of everything currently listed.

A low band is not an accusation. It means the tickets cost more per 1% of winning chance than most of what is listed today, which can simply mean the prize is bigger.

When we do not score a raffle

We leave the score off when we cannot work one out honestly. That is not a mark against the competition. It happens when:

• the ticket price or the total number of tickets is not published;
• the competition has no fixed ticket count, such as an unlimited-entry draw;
• we have not been able to read reliable figures from the operator's site yet.

Sell-out projections

Where a competition has a closing date and we have enough readings to see a trend, we work out where sales are likely to land at the draw and say so in plain English, along the lines of “On track to draw part-sold”. It is a projection from recent sales rather than a promise. A late rush, or a change by the operator, will move it.

What this is not

The True Odds Score is information. It is not advice, and it is not a recommendation to enter anything. PrizeOn does not run competitions, sell tickets or take part in any draw. Our figures come from operators' own public pages, so they can be wrong or out of date. Always check the operator's site and their terms before you enter.

Competitions can be addictive. Please play responsibly. Free, confidential help is available from BeGambleAware, GamCare and GAMSTOP. 18+.

Think a score is wrong? Get in touch. If we are reading an operator's figures incorrectly, we want to know about it.