ialottery blog

‘Lucky’ Numbers In Powerball?

A suburban Chicago newspaper has conducted its own study of the numbers selected in Powerball drawings through the years and has an interesting take on what it all means to lottery players. Check out the Daily Herald’s story here.   

Explaining The Odds

We’ve talked about it here before, but probably the most common question we get is about the odds in lottery games, especially instant-scratch games.

Lottery players across Iowa win prizes each day, but everyone should remember that each play is based solely on random chance. There are many winning tickets, but your purchase does not guarantee a winner.

Let’s take the scratch game “Dough Plow” as an example. The overall odds of winning a prize in that $1 game are 1 in 4.65. So, the question we often get goes something like this: “The overall odds said 1:4.65, but I bought 5 tickets and I didn’t win, so your odds must be wrong.” In fact, they’re not.

The overall odds of winning on a scratch ticket apply to each ticket purchased in a game, not a series of tickets. So, if a scratch game has overall odds of winning of 1:3, that doesn't mean that if you buy three tickets that one will be a winner. It means that if you were to buy all of the tickets available in that game, approximately 1 in 3 of them would win a prize.
 
It’s also important to know that the distribution of tickets within our games is completely random. That’s part of the security process involved in running a lottery; not even our sales representatives who deliver tickets to stores know how many winning tickets are in a particular pack. So, there could be three winning tickets in a row in one of our games, and then several nonwinning tickets after that. Security is of the utmost concern at the Iowa Lottery -- people play our games because they understand the integrity behind our products.
 
The bottom line is, big winners happen all over the state at various retail locations, and higher ticket sales at a particular location do mean more winners there as well. Some busy locations where scratch tickets are sold sell several times as many tickets as others, and therefore replace ticket packs more often - creating more winners.

We keep a complete list of winners on our Web site, as well as a list of all the remaining prizes in our instant-scratch games.
 
We always encourage our players to remember the entertainment that lottery games have provided them and the help that lottery money has meant to the state of Iowa. Players not only are playing a lottery ticket in the hopes of winning money, they are entertaining themselves and enjoying the experience. Since the Iowa Lottery's start in 1985, its players have won more than $2.4 billion in prizes while the lottery has raised more than $1.2 billion for state programs.