Reading "Do people win on scratch cards?" starts with the family it belongs to. Every casino floor carries a few games that are neither cards dealt to a hand nor a wheel with a ball in it. Keno, bingo and scratch cards all work by matching numbers or symbols already decided somewhere else, and casino war sits beside them as the shortest game in the building. They share a shape: the player commits first, and the result arrives in a single step.
A scratch card is a draw that already happened. The whole print run is decided before any card is sold, so the prizes are a fixed set distributed through the batch rather than a chance calculated at the moment of play. This is why a card cannot be luckier at one time of day than another, and why the remaining prize table for a run is a more useful thing to look at than the odds on the back.
Casino war is the card game of childhood with a stake on it. Both sides get one card, the higher wins, and a tie offers either surrender for half or a raise to fight it out. A tie is far commoner here than at a card table, since only the rank matters and suits are ignored. Those tie rules carry the whole game: the raise is the only decision in it, and the house keeps its margin almost entirely from what the matching cards do.
Keno asks for a handful of numbers from a field of eighty. Twenty are drawn, and the payout depends on how many of the picks appear among them and on how many were picked in the first place. That second half surprises people: matching four of five is a different prize from matching four of eight, and each spot count has its own column on the pay table. The table is the game, and two venues running the same draw may pay quite differently.
Common winning patterns are a single line, two lines, or the whole card, known as a full house, with the rules sheet naming which ones count.
The player picks a handful of numbers from a field of eighty, twenty are drawn, and the payout depends on matches and on how many were picked.
When both cards match in rank, the player chooses to surrender half the stake or raise and go to war; the house draws most of its margin from ties.
A caller draws numbers one at a time, and each player marks them on a printed card until a winning pattern completes.