It’s time for the latest map in our project this year to track the spots where the biggest lottery prizes have been won in Iowa!
Iowa Lottery players claimed 316 prizes of $600 or more in November, bringing the grand total so far to 4,034 for calendar year 2019.
As you can see from the patterns involved, something that we’ve often said about prize wins holds true: In bigger cities, more people are buying tickets and winning prizes. That’s not a matter of luck, it’s a matter of population.
Another way of putting it is that if 5 percent of lottery tickets are sold in a particular area, you'll 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 sold.
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!
And as always, remember that our maps only show those big prizes that have been claimed. They don’t include those prizes that have been won but aren’t claimed yet.
Hi, Frederick. I address that detail about population base and lottery winnings in this blog entry, so please be sure to check out those details. They answer the question you've raised.
Posted by: Mary Neubauer | December 10, 2019 at 09:51 AM
If you look at the map it seems they keep the winner's all mostly around desmoines kinda sad.
Posted by: Frederick W Vanderpool | December 06, 2019 at 09:55 PM