Grandmother's shocking secret to winning £1 million on scratchcard

Grace Walker, a 49-year-old grandmother from Hamilton in Lanarkshire, is celebrating having won £1 million on a scratchcard. She revealed the secret of her success: she has spent tens of thousands of pounds on the cards over the years. It was a particularly risky strategy but for her, at least, it paid off.

Grace was emotional when she picked up her enormous cheque at the press event. She told the Daily Mail that she had been in floods of tears, and had almost fainted when she won. Her daughter assumed she was joking, and her husband William insisted on checking the ticket.

She admitted to the Daily Record that she had slept with the winning ticket in her pyjama trousers for two nights, for fear someone would break in and steal it.
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Grace said one of her daughters would like a puppy, that she would spend some of the money on a holiday, and would probably get an iPhone. Other than that, the money won't change them. William, 48, will continue to work as a removals man, and the family will still live in the council house where Grace has lived for 30 years. William added: "I support Celtic and I thought about getting a season ticket but they are rubbish."

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Her secret
The secret of her big win turned out to be that she buys up to 30 scratch cards a week - costing anything from £1-£5. Assuming they were £5 cards, that would be almost £8,000 a year. She also said she'd been doing it for 'a long time' so the total figure could run into tens of thousands of pounds.

The good news for the Walkers is that they were very lucky. The bad news for everyone else is that you are highly unlikely to be anywhere near as lucky.

On average if you spent £8,000 a year on scratchcards you would get a return of £4,960 - because in a Freedom of Information request, Camelot has stated that scratchcards return an average of 62%.

Technically this means that if you bought £8,000 of scratchcards every year between the ages of 16 and 80, and they paid out exactly averagely, you would stand to lose almost £195,000.

Some of the games have different percentage payouts. Some of the cheapest tickets have the lowest, so for example, Lucky Stars returns 60.91% in prizes and Lucky Dog 61.75%. Meanwhile, some of the more expensive ones have higher percentage payouts - like the Monopoly game which returns 70.85%, and Mega-rich 74.44%.

In theory this means that if you play more expensive games you stand to lose less money. However, it's still far more likely to be a recipe for losing a fortune than gaining one.

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