ialottery blog

What Player Mail Do YOU Have For Us?

You’ve seen me blog through the years about lots of the questions we get from players, and as we head into the weekend, consider this is an open-door invitation for you to reach out to us if you ever want to know something about the Iowa Lottery.

While the Internet has certainly given us all new ways to communicate, the amount of MIS-information out there these days is staggering. So if you have a question about the lottery or the tickets we sell, we’d really like the answers you get to come straight from us, rather than some random source online.

Feel free to reach out to us here on the blog or on any of our social media pages, check out our website, or email us at Wmaster@ialottery.com. We’d love to hear from you, and if you have a lottery question you’d like to see answered, leave a comment here!

17 Football Ticket Packages On the Line In ‘Kinnick Gridiron Giveaway’

Seventeen football-ticket prize packages to next month’s Illinois-Iowa game are on the line in a new promotion from the Iowa Lottery that just started.

From today through the morning of Nov. 12, lottery players who buy Powerball® tickets in Iowa can enter the “Kinnick Gridiron Giveaway” for a chance to win one of 17 prize packages to the Illinois-Iowa football game Nov. 23 in Iowa City.

Each prize package includes two tickets for seats in a VIP area in the North End Zone at Kinnick Stadium, food and nonalcoholic drinks during the game, $100 spending cash, and two bags with University of Iowa and Iowa Lottery swag.

Please note that simply buying a Powerball ticket during the promotion period won’t automatically enter you into the promotion. You’ll need to buy a Powerball ticket in Iowa anytime from today through 8:59 a.m. Nov. 12. Then, you’ll enter that ticket into the promotion through your VIP Club account. (Click here to join if you’re not already a member.) And remember, you can enter both winning AND nonwinning Powerball tickets!    

Each eligible Powerball ticket entered will count as one entry into the promotion, regardless of the number of plays on it or the drawings that those plays may span.

We’ll hold the drawing Nov. 13 to determine the Iowa Lottery winners who will be going to the Hawkeyes’ final home game of the year. Each trip prize package is valued at more than $1,000.

Player Mail: What About The Odds In Your Holiday Games?

Now that our holiday-themed scratch games have hit store shelves for the year, we’ve gotten a couple player questions about the number of prizes available in them and the odds of winning those prizes. I always tell people that lottery players pay attention to detail – and our player mail has proven that point!

One player noticed that holiday games don’t have as many top prizes as our regular games and wondered why. That’s because our holiday-themed games by design will only be on the market for a short period of time while many of our other games are sold for a year or more.

We order smaller quantities of tickets in our holiday games, which means there will be a smaller number of prizes involved. The key point, however, is that the odds of winning in our holiday-themed games are in line with those in our other games, and that’s what matters when it comes to the chance of winning a prize.

“Crossword” games are a perennial favorite for scratch players, so let’s compare the “$30,000 Holiday Crossword” game that’s available right now with the “Bonus Crossword” game. They’re both $3 versions of Crossword, and they have the same overall odds of winning: about 1 in 3.52.

That’s also the case with the $2 “Nutcracker Bingo” holiday game and the $2 “Wild Bingo” game. The overall odds of winning are the same in both: about 1 in 3.34.

Then there are the folks who tell us they like our non-holiday games and want to see them come back. Well, guess what? They will! Our holiday-themed games will only be on the market until early January, and then our other games will cycle back onto store shelves when the holidays are over.

The folks in our Storm Lake office say that it’s snowing there today, so I guess it IS starting to look like winter in Iowa!

Holiday Promo Starts Today! 93 Cash Prizes Totaling $200,000 On The Line

You’ve asked us to give you plenty of time to have a shot at winning cash for the holidays, so our holiday promotion this year is starting today! We’ll give away 93 cash prizes totaling $200,000 in our “Ho Ho Dough” promotion, with six drawing dates between now and early January.

We’re applying the “max bet” concept to this year’s promotion, meaning that the size of the prize you can win will increase along with the purchase price of the scratch ticket you’ve entered.

You can enter the promotion using nonwinning tickets in the 11 holiday-themed scratch games we’ll have available this year. Tickets in nine of those games are already in stores, and the final two games debut Nov. 4. 

The promotion’s entry period began at 9 a.m. today and the first drawing date is two weeks from now, on Oct. 24. We’ll hold three prize drawings that day: one for five prizes of $1,000, one for five prizes of $1,500, and one for five prizes of $2,500.

The drawing for the $1,000 prizes can be entered with nonwinning tickets in our $1 and $2 holiday games, while nonwinning tickets in our $3 and $5 games can be entered in the $1,500 prize drawing, and nonwinning tickets in our $10 holiday games are eligible for the $2,500 prize drawing.

That same process will apply to the rest of the promotion’s preliminary drawings, through Jan. 9. Any entries that don’t win a prize in the preliminary drawings will remain eligible for the grand-prize round.

The Ho Ho Dough grand-prize drawings will be held on Thursday, Jan. 9. Again, the max-bet approach will be involved, with grand prizes of $10,000, $15,000 and $25,000 on the line in the applicable categories.

To enter the promotion, you’ll need to join or already be a member of our free VIP Club. And remember that you can enter by scanning your tickets on our app or through the VIP Club website. 

Here’s the entire Ho Ho dough drawing schedule and the prizes that will be awarded:

Were You One Of Our 322 Big Winners In September?

We’ve been tracking our big winners all across Iowa for the past nine months in the hopes to give a greater perspective on just how many winners we have all over our great state. Each month’s map represents just how many prizes of $600 or more were claimed.

September brought us 322 more lucky winners of $600 or more, bringing the grand total thus far to 3,375 for the year. On average there are about 375 winning claims filed each month.

Click here for a direct link to this map in an interactive format where you can see the details involved. Each dot shows the retail location where the winning ticket was purchased, the prize won, the game involved, and the date the prize was claimed.

The dots are in different colors for the four types of lottery games here in Iowa: scratch games, lotto games, InstaPlay games and pull-tab games. Scratch tickets have always been the Iowa Lottery’s leading product and they’re represented on the map by red dots, so there are a lot of them!

As always, remember that our maps only show those big prizes that have been claimed. They don’t include those prizes won but not claimed yet.

The Four Iowa Winners Going To NYC For New Year’s Are …

We held the drawing today to select the four Iowa winners who will go to New York City to ring in 2020 and have a shot at becoming the first Powerball Millionaire of the Year!

The winners are:

        Debb Pille, Carroll
        Linda Schellhorn, Elk Run Heights
        Deb Simpson, West Liberty
        Barb Wall, Hazel Green

From Sept. 4 through Monday, members of our free VIP Club could enter the Powerball New Year’s Rockin’ Eve promotion for a chance to win one of four trip packages to ring in 2020 in NYC. Each exclusive trip for two includes round-trip airfare; a three-night hotel stay in Times Square; two tickets to an NYC theater performance; a holiday dinner cruise on the Hudson River; $1,000 spending cash; and New Year’s Eve festivities including dinner, the Times Square party, and viewing of the iconic ball-drop.

Just after the ball drops to bring in the New Year, Powerball’s First Millionaire of the Year will be announced live on the broadcast of “Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve with Ryan Seacrest 2020.” It could be one of the Iowa winners – we’ll all have to wait and see that night!

Lotteries from across the country are participating in the Powerball New Year’s Rockin’ Eve celebration and each is sending players to NYC for the party. The $1 million winner will be one of those trip winners.

Our VIP Club Newsletter Went Out Early & Here’s Why

The members of our VIP Club got their October newsletter and free-play coupon a few days early, and there’s a reason why.

 

We’ll be doing some maintenance on the Iowa Lottery’s website beginning on Monday, and for a period of time, members of our VIP Club won’t be able to log in to their VIP Club account and may not be able to access their monthly coupon. So, bonus for them: This month’s edition of the VIP Connection newsletter, which normally would have gone out on Tuesday (Oct. 1), was sent out today. That means they’ll have extra time to redeem the coupon inside.
 

The October free-play coupon will be valid from today through Oct. 31.

The changes to our website should make it easier for everyone to navigate the VIP Club and enter Play It Again® promotions. Things should be back to normal on the website within 24-48 hours.

 

Once we’re done with the maintenance, if you have a bookmark or shortcut to the VIP Club website, you’ll need to update it because the link involved will change slightly.

We Mean It: If Playing Stresses You Out, Don’t Do It

A recent conversation has stuck with me, and I’m sharing the background from it here on the blog in the hope it can help anyone who’s struggling with gambling.

A man reached out to us to say he’s unhappy that he hasn’t won many lottery prizes, and he expressed concern about how much he plays. He wondered if we’d care about what he had to say.

We do care.

I shared with him something we absolutely mean here at the Iowa Lottery: If playing the lottery is stressing you out or causing you to worry, then don’t do it. We never want anyone to play beyond what they can afford. You’ve heard us say, “Playing smart is a lot more fun,” as a quick way to signify that.

Just like the image above of people coming together to support each other, know that help is always available here in Iowa if you or someone you know is struggling with gambling. The Your Life Iowa program is always just a click away, and 1-800-BETSOFF, the statewide hotline for problem gambling, is available through live chat, texting or telephone.

Mapping It Out: More Winners Are In Areas Where More People Live

We came across a map this week that drives home something we’ve talked about for years when it comes to where you’ll find lottery winners in Iowa.

The map is from the folks at the World Population Review, and in Iowa’s case, the group’s analysis shows that more than a quarter of the state’s population lives in a seven-county area in central Iowa. Polk County is at the center of that region and is Iowa’s largest county, with more than 480,000 people living there.

The other counties in the area that accounts for 26 percent of the state’s population are: Dallas, Warren, Marion, Jasper, Marshall and Story.

Another 23 percent of Iowa’s population lives in six counties in eastern Iowa (Linn, Johnson, Muscatine, Scott, Clinton and Dubuque).

In general, you’ll find that the number of lottery winners follows population patterns. Where more people live, there will be more people buying lottery tickets and winning prizes. It doesn’t mean they’re luckier, it just means that there are more of them.

Another way of putting that is that if 5 percent of lottery tickets are sold in a particular area, you expect to find about 5 percent of the overall winners there. Everyone has the same chance of winning but there will be more winners in places where more tickets are being sold.

The image for this blog entry shows World Population Review’s map of Iowa at the top, and our latest monthly map of big lottery winners at the bottom. You can definitely see the areas with higher populations on both maps!