We've blogged about this issue before, but it’s something we receive ongoing questions about, so I'm covering it again today. The topic at hand is the odds in lottery games, and specifically, whether the odds we provide are wrong.
It’s understandable that people have questions about lottery odds. The laws of random statistics can be a difficult concept to absorb, even for those of us who work at the lottery.
Lottery players across Iowa win prizes every day, but the thing to remember is that each play is based solely on random chance. There are many winning tickets, but making a lottery purchase does not guarantee that you’ll win.
Let’s take the odds in the “Happy Holidays” scratch game as an example. That $5 game hit the market on Oct. 5, and the overall odds of winning a prize in it are about 1 in 3.30. The common question we get goes something like this: “The overall odds of winning are 1:3.30, but I bought four tickets and I didn’t win, so your odds must be wrong.” But in fact, they’re not.
The overall odds of winning a prize in a scratch game apply to each ticket purchased in that game, not a series of tickets. So, if a scratch game has overall odds of winning of about 1:3, that doesn't mean that if you buy four tickets, one will automatically be a winner. It means that if you were to buy all of the tickets available in that game, approximately 1 in 4 of them would win a prize. It’s also important to remember that the tickets within our games are distributed randomly. That’s part of our security procedures, and not even our sales representatives who deliver our tickets to stores know where the winning tickets are or which stores will receive them. So, there could be three winning tickets in a row in one of our games, and then several nonwinning tickets in a row after that. Security is of the utmost concern at the Iowa Lottery – people play our games because they know we have integrity in our products. We work hard to ensure that everyone has the same fair shot at winning. The bottom line is, big winners happen all over the state at various retail locations, and higher ticket sales at a particular location will mean more winners there as well. Some busy locations where scratch tickets are sold sell several times as many tickets as others, and therefore they sell through ticket packs more often, creating more winners.
We keep a six-month list of all winners of $600 or more on our website as well as a list of the remaining prizes in our scratch and pull-tab games and a list of unclaimed lotto prizes of $9,000 or more. Those are all part of our efforts to be as transparent as we can about the prizes involved in our games.
And for those of you playing this year’s holiday-themed scratch tickets, remember that nonwinning tickets in those games can be entered in our “Holiday Hoopla™” promotion for a chance to win cash prizes or men’s college basketball tournament tickets.
Hi again, Philip. You are correct that winning tickets are distributed randomly within our instant-scratch and pull-tab games. Not even we know where the winning tickets are within a particular game. That's a mandatory security feature, and one that helps protect the integrity of our games.
Posted by: Mary Neubauer | November 13, 2015 at 03:00 PM
So it's possible that most of the winning tickets could be back in the warehouse and never get out.
Posted by: Philip Luksetich | November 13, 2015 at 08:09 AM
Hi, Philip. Great question. But no, the odds don't change with whether or not a particular ticket has been played. The odds apply to the game as a whole and to smaller subsets of tickets within the game called "pools" of tickets. So, the numbers are correct. As I've said many times, the world of random statistics is a complicated one! :)
Posted by: Mary Neubauer | November 10, 2015 at 03:51 PM
Didn't you leave out one very important fact--That the odds are only correct if ALL the tickets printed for this game are scratched?
Posted by: Philip Luksetich | November 10, 2015 at 03:32 PM
Hi, Dan. Your question about the odds in our games is answered here in this blog entry. But your comment goes to show that folks do wonder about that question! In regards to the location of lottery winners, people all across the state -- including in Des Moines -- win lottery prizes every day. If you call up our winners list for the past six months for prizes of $600 or more, you'll see that the first entry on the list is a Des Moines man who won a $1 million prize. There are lots of other Des Moines winners on the list as well. The link is here: http://www.ialottery.com/PDF/winnersforwebsite.pdf
Posted by: Mary Neubauer | November 05, 2015 at 01:28 PM