How we score value.

OLG publishes, for every instant game, its top prize tiers — how many of each were printed and how many are still unclaimed. That’s the raw material. The Value Score reads it every morning and asks one question: are the big prizes disproportionately still out there?

The idea in one line

Compare how much prize money is left to how many prizes by head-count are left. If the dollars are draining slower than the count, the game’s remaining tickets are unusually rich — a buy signal.

The steps

1 · Add up prizes, two ways

Across a game’s valued prize tiers:

2 · Two fractions left

f is the “remaining prize ratio” — a proxy for how much of the print run is still unsold. g weights that by dollars.

3 · Retention = value vs count

• retention > 1 — big prizes are still disproportionately unclaimed. Better value.
• retention = 1 — prizes draining evenly with sales. Baseline.
• retention < 1 — jackpots mostly gone, small prizes left. Worse value.

4 · Scale to a familiar number

The 0.62 is the rough Ontario instant-game return-to-player, used only so a baseline game reads about 62 — roughly “cents of prize value left per dollar.” It’s a fixed multiplier, so it never changes the order of the ranking; that’s driven entirely by OLG’s own counts. We list every game highest score first.

What the score is — and isn’t

• It is a like-for-like way to compare which games still have the most prize value left today, straight from OLG’s numbers.
• It isn’t a prediction, a system, or a way to beat the odds. The house edge is baked in and unchanged.
• It works from top-prize tiers. OLG’s feed lists a game’s notable prizes, not every $2 win, so the score reflects the prizes worth chasing. Treat close scores as ties.

Freshness

The rankings are rebuilt every morning at 6:00 AM Eastern from OLG’s public data. This page’s data was generated July 2, 2026. Prizes can be claimed at any time — always confirm the current numbers on olg.ca before you buy.