Scratch-offs, pull-tabs, and Fast Play: the instant lottery games explained

When people talk about the instant lottery they're usually picturing a scratch-off, but that's only one of three instant formats you'll come across, alongside pull-tabs and Fast Play, and although all three pay out on the spot they work in genuinely different ways.

Scratch-offs

A scratch-off is a printed card with a latex coating over the play area, and you scratch that coating away to reveal numbers or symbols whose outcome was fixed the moment the ticket came off the press. They turn up in gas stations, grocery stores and convenience stores at prices running from $1 up past $50, and they're the format we cover in the most depth, including how the tickets are actually made.

Pull-tabs

Pull-tabs, sometimes called break-opens or Nevada tickets, are the ones you'll find at bars, veterans and fraternal clubs and charity events, and instead of a latex coating they're small paper or cardboard tickets with perforated tabs you peel back to expose a row of symbols, rather like a tiny slot machine you open by hand. The winners are predetermined here as well and come from a finite sealed pool, so any given box holds a fixed number of them, and the tickets tend to be cheap and quick, which is part of why they've become a staple of charitable gaming.

Fast Play

Fast Play, which some states brand as progressive instant or something similar, is the newest of the three, and there's nothing to scratch or peel at all. You ask for it at the counter, the clerk prints it from the same terminal that produces draw tickets, and the result comes out already resolved. Many Fast Play games carry a progressive jackpot that climbs with every ticket sold until somebody hits it, which is something a traditional scratch-off can't offer because all of its prizes are fixed at printing.

Which one to play

The format itself tells you very little about the value, since a scratch-off, a pull-tab and a Fast Play ticket each carry their own odds and payout percentage, and any of the three can be a reasonable buy or a poor one on its own numbers. Which of them you can even find depends on where you live, because not every state runs all three.

In every case you're playing a game of chance where the house keeps a cut, so picking the ticket with the better published return is the one piece of control you actually have. We rank scratch-offs that way with ValueScore™, and if you're weighing instants against the big draws we compared scratch-offs and draw games separately.