Column: Feeling shortchanged by lottery
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By ROD STETZER
rod.stetzer@lee.net
Monday, July 7, 2008 2:05 PM CDT
When you plunk down money to buy a Wisconsin Lottery scratch ticket, you expect to have a chance to win a jackpot.
Wanna bet?
The lottery’s Web site, Wilottery.com, lists 46 current scratch-off tickets, which the lottery also calls instant tickets.
Of those, four games have all of their top prizes gobbled up. You can’t win the $250,000 top prize in Cash Blockbuster, or the $2,000 jackpot of Bacon and Eggs, the $25,000 top prize of Monopoly or the $50,000 offered by Poker Showdown.
Those top prizes including three for Cash Blockbuster, four for Bacon and Eggs, three for Monopoly and two for Poker Showdown have been given out. Gone and done.
And other states do much the same thing. USA Today reported on June 29 that about half of the 42 states having lotteries sell tickets after the top prizes are given out.
A professor, Scott Hoover of Washington and Lee University, is suing the Virginia Lottery. He bought a $5 “Beginner’s Luck” ticket in August 2007. But the top prize had been given out the previous month.
Hoover used public records to calculate that Virginia sold about $20 million a year each year for three years in tickets after the top prize had been given out. That lottery now ends a game after the top prize has been given out.
What Wisconsin does isn’t readily apparent on its Web site under a listing of “Top Prize Status.”
“All of the games listed here are ‘active’ on the Lottery’s system so that players can continue to redeem prizes they’ve already won. Just because a game is active and listed here does not mean it is still being sold.”
Maybe. Maybe not.
Cash Blockbuster is an old game, having gone on sale on July 23, 2007. Likewise for Bacon and Eggs (Aug. 20, 2007) and Monopoly (Sept. 10, 2007). But Poker Showdown is just a few months old, starting on March 28, 2008.
The thing is, the lottery does not expressly say these games are retired, these games are no longer sold.
So you come across a bunch of scratch-off tickets at a gas station and you’re tempted. How do you know you’re buying one that gives you a chance to win a top prize?
About the only sure way is plowing through the lottery Web site, search out each game and look specifically for the “top prize remaining” category. What you see may surprise you. For example, the oldest game available, Crossword, still has two of its 41 top prizes left. Still other, much newer games have only one top prize left.
If you believe the lottery, the top prize is no big deal anyway.
“Remember: A game’s top prizes make up a small percentage of its total prize dollars,” the lottery’s Web site graciously states.
Remember that when you see a top prize plastered in huge numbers at the top of a scratch ticket.
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