Author: Eric Grundhauser / Source: Atlas Obscura
To a lotologist—a person who collects lottery tickets—the thrill of a scratch-off ticket isn’t in the chance to hit the jackpot. Instead, what’s important is to get your hands on the card itself.
But if that’s the case, what makes one ticket more valuable than another? The answer, according to one collector, is quality, rarity, and latex.“I started collecting in 1989. At that time, my father and I had a small grocery store,” says Arthur Rein, a longtime lotologist. At some point, Rein began saving one card from each new scratch-off game that would arrive at his family’s New York-based store. In the early days of his collection, he was only getting a new game ticket every few months. But as his fascination with scratch cards grew, he began traveling to nearby states such as Vermont and New Hampshire to expand his collection. “It wasn’t to win. What I was saving was the tickets that were being redeemed by the customers that had already won,” he says. “It’s not really a gambling hobby. It’s just a collecting hobby.”
At first, Rein’s hobby was a solitary pursuit. “I thought I was the only one collecting these tickets,” he says. But eventually, he discovered he wasn’t alone. He joined the Global Lottery Collector’s Society, a loosely organized group of fans and collectors who trade and catalog scratch-off games released in most of the states across the U.S. According to Rein, the society has seen a decline in membership over the years, but currently there are a couple hundred collectors active in the community.
The scratch-off lottery industry has only increased in the years since Rein started collecting. And by trading cards with members of the society from around the United States, the scope of his collecting has also expanded. Today, Rein says his collection contains roughly 57,000 individual scratch-off cards, kept in stacks of binders at his home. That includes every scratch-off card the state of New Jersey has ever released. “How many people can say that? The director of the New Jersey Lottery can’t say that,” says Rein. By his own estimate, his collection is the second or third largest in the society.
Each collector tends to have different goals and standards when it comes to the lotto cards…
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