The Kerala lottery online: what you can and cannot do

Can you buy a Kerala lottery ticket online?

No. The Kerala State Lottery is sold on paper, by agents and sellers the State licenses, and the Directorate of Kerala State Lotteries does not sell its tickets online. Any site that says it is selling you an official Kerala ticket over the internet is describing something the State does not offer.

What can be done online is a bet on the result. The State publishes every result in its gazette after the draw; a betting site takes a stake on a ticket number you choose and pays, at fixed odds, whatever that published result says the number won. That is what this site offers. It is not a State ticket, the State is not party to it, and the prize is paid by the site and not by the Directorate. The play page says the same thing above the slip, because it is the first thing a player is owed.

How the draw works

One game is drawn every afternoon at 3:00 PM India time, seven weekly games in rotation — each has its own name, its own two-letter code and its own running draw number, so a result is cited as, for example, Karunya Plus KN-641. Festival bumper draws run alongside them a few times a year on a different prize structure.

A ticket is a two-letter series and a six-digit number, printed together: PE 687207. Each weekly draw prints twelve series, and every series carries the numbers 100000 to 999999. That is 10,800,000 tickets in a draw, and each exists exactly once.

What the series is for

The top prizes go to a TICKET, not to a number. The first prize is one series and one number together — so 687207 in series PE wins it and 687207 in series PA does not. The same six digits in each of the other eleven series win the consolation prize instead, which is why a result always names the series.

Most of the prizes below that are decided by the last four digits alone, in every series alike: the result lists the winning endings for each prize, and a ticket whose last four digits match one of them wins it. This is where almost every winning ticket comes from, and it is why a full result runs to a few hundred four-digit numbers.

The odds, stated plainly

The first prize is one ticket in 10,800,000. That is a count, not an estimate: twelve series of nine hundred thousand numbers, one winner. An ending prize is its number of winning endings out of the 10,000 possible — a prize that draws a hundred endings is won by one ticket in a hundred.

Taken together the State’s prize table returns well under half of what is staked, which is a lower return than most games on this site and is the nature of a state lottery: the rest is the State’s revenue. A bet at the State’s own ratios carries the same return. The play page states the chance of every prize and the overall return for the table in force, computed rather than quoted, so check it there rather than trusting a figure in a guide.

No series, number, ending or "guessing number" is more likely than another. Every ticket in a draw has exactly the same chance, and anybody selling predictions for a mechanical draw is selling nothing.

Checking a result

The result that counts is the one the Directorate gazettes. Results appear the same afternoon, and the published document is what a paper ticket is claimed against, within the claim period and through the channels the State sets.

This site shows each result exactly as gazetted, top tickets with their series and every winning ending, on a dated page of its own, and publishes the same data as JSON under an open licence. Bets placed here are settled against that result automatically; there is nothing to claim. A paper ticket is a different matter and can only be claimed from the State.