Interesting Secret Santa Stats & A Note About Top Prizes In Our Holiday Games

As entries keep coming in for our Secret Santa promotion, we’ve had fun watching the statistics to see how players are enjoying the holiday fun. Here’s the inside scoop for you about this year’s numbers.

Secret Santa marks the first time that you can use the lottery’s app to scan your tickets and enter the promotion. And players are embracing the new technology, with about 30 percent of entries in Secret Santa being made via the app.

What’s been really interesting for us are the numbers for the Secret Santa vs. Not So Secret Santa prize drawings. As you may know, the Not So Secret Santa prize amounts are known in advance, but the Secret Santa prizes are announced after the drawing is held. It turns out that so far, players are enjoying the mystery of the Secret Santa prizes. More than half the entries in the promotion so far have been for the Secret Santa drawings.

We’ve also gotten a couple player questions about the number of prizes available in our holiday scratch games this year. Those games by their very nature will only be available for sale for a short period of time. We therefore do our best to order the quantity of tickets that we think should last for the holiday season.

After our 2016 holiday season, we reviewed the numbers and made adjustments in the tickets we ordered this year. In many instances, we ordered fewer tickets. The number of prizes available in a scratch game corresponds to the number of tickets available in it, so some of our holiday games this year have fewer prizes than were in past year’s games. The odds of winning have not changed, it is just the number of tickets overall that decreased.

Thank you as always for paying attention to the numbers, and have fun with this year’s holiday games. The snow we’re seeing today here in Iowa certainly makes it clear that winter has arrived!