Kerala Lottery Draw Codes and Series Letters — SM, KN, AK, BR and the Rest, Explained

A state lottery has to identify an enormous number of draws unambiguously and permanently, across decades, in documents that are legal records. A date is not good enough for that: dates repeat across different lotteries, they shift for holidays, and they say nothing about which ticket is involved.

So Kerala does what most large lotteries do and gives each series a short prefix, then counts the draws within it. The result is a naming system where every draw ever held has exactly one name, that name never changes, and it can be printed compactly on a ticket and on a gazette header.

For a ticket holder this is a gift, once you know it exists. It turns finding a result from a memory exercise into a lookup. You do not need to reconstruct what day you bought the ticket. You read two things off the ticket and go.

The table below lists the letter codes that come up most often in searches and on tickets, alongside the ticket each is commonly reported to belong to. Read the caveat underneath it before you rely on any row.

The caveat first, because it governs the whole table: this is a set of commonly reported mappings, not a legal register. The binding record of which ticket a code belongs to is the printed ticket and the official gazette for that draw — not this page and not any other summary you will find.

That matters because the Kerala State Lotteries department has introduced, renamed and rescheduled its weekly lotteries more than once in recent years. When that happens, the association between a prefix and a ticket name — and between a ticket and a weekday — can change, and every blog table published before the change quietly becomes wrong. Ours included, eventually.

That is not a reason to avoid the table. It is a reason to treat it as orientation and to resolve anything specific at source. The ticket in your hand carries the definitive code, and the gazette for a given draw carries the definitive lottery name against that code. Between them there is no ambiguity left to resolve.

One row in that table causes more trouble than all the others combined. SM and SS are different series: on the commonly reported mappings SM is Samrudhi and SS is Sthree Sakthi. Two letters apart, both starting with S, and constantly swapped for one another in searches, forwarded messages and hastily written result pages.

Because each series runs its own independent counter, the confusion does not produce an obvious error. SM-65 and SS-65 both exist, both have a real gazette, and both are full of legitimate numbers. Open the wrong one and nothing warns you — you just read a valid document about a draw you did not enter.

This is exactly why the method sections of our guides never ask you to know the mapping. The instruction is always to read the prefix off the printed ticket and confirm it matches the prefix in the gazette's identification block. That check is self-verifying: it does not care whether any published table is current, and it will still work if the department renames a ticket next year.

The number after the prefix is a simple counter. The first draw of a series is 1 and it increases by one for each subsequent draw of that same lottery. It does not reset annually, it does not skip, and it has no relationship to the numbering of any other series.

This last point is the one that catches people. Two codes with similar numbers — say SM-65 and KN-65 — are not contemporaneous, are not related, and tell you nothing about each other. Each counter started when its series started, and series started at different times.

The counter also gives you a rough sense of a series' age without any external information. A weekly lottery accumulates about fifty-two draws a year, so a three-digit draw number implies a series that has been running for several years. That is a sanity check, not a fact — a series that was renamed may have had its counter handled differently, which is another reason to resolve specifics at source.

Alongside the weekly tickets, Kerala runs periodic bumper lotteries tied to festivals and seasons. These are separate products with their own ticket runs, their own prize structures and their own codes, announced with each edition.

We are not publishing a bumper code list, for the same reason we are cautious about the weekly table: bumper editions come and go, and a list of codes from a previous year is misleading rather than helpful. The department announces each bumper with its code and its schedule, and that announcement is the reliable version.

What is worth knowing structurally is that bumper tickets are generally sold over a longer window than weekly tickets, and their draw and result timing are set per edition rather than following a weekly pattern. So if you hold a bumper ticket, the relevant dates are the ones on that ticket and in that edition's announcement, not the weekly rhythm you may be used to.

On a Kerala ticket the identifying information is printed in a few different places, and it is easy to grab the wrong string. Work through it deliberately the first time and it becomes obvious afterwards.

You are looking for two separate things. First, the draw identification: the lottery name, the series prefix and the draw number, usually printed together near the top with the draw date. Second, your own ticket number: a series letter or letters followed by digits, which is the string you will match against prize lists.

They are different, they look similar, and mixing them up is the single most common reason someone concludes a result sheet is wrong. The draw code answers which sheet. The ticket number answers whether you are on it.