Last month, we asked our first Truth or Myth question to have everyone put their thinking caps on. Now we’re back for another round. This is a good one, and we hear it a lot.
Truth or Myth: If the overall odds of winning in a game are 1 in 3.67, if you buy 4 tickets in a row, 1 of them is guaranteed to win a prize.
That’s a myth.
The overall odds of winning a prize in a scratch, InstaPlay or pull-tab game apply to each ticket purchased in that game, not a series of tickets. So, if a game has overall odds of winning of about 1:4, that doesn't mean that if you buy 4 tickets, 1 of them is guaranteed to win. 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.
Winning tickets are distributed randomly in our games, so no one, not even those of us at the lottery or the retailers who sell our tickets, know when or where the next win will hit. That’s an important part of our lottery security procedures.
Think of the random distribution of winning tickets like a deck of cards that’s been shuffled. Within the shuffled deck, there could be three hearts or clubs in a
row and then several cards in a row after that in other suits. It’s the same thing in our games. There could be three winning tickets in a row, and then several nonwinning tickets in a row after that.
It’s our job to ensure that everyone has the same fair shot at winning. The bottom line is, big winners happen all over the state. And, higher ticket sales in a particular area will mean more winners there. It doesn’t mean those tickets are luckier. It just means there were more tickets sold in that area, so there will be more winners there as well, simply based on volume.
We keep a list of all winners of $600 or more in the past year on our website along with the remaining prizes of $50 or more in our scratch and InstaPlay games. We also have a list of unclaimed prizes of $600 or more in our lotto games.
Those lists are part of our efforts to be as transparent as we can about the details in our games. So is this Truth or Myth series.
Whether you play the lottery or not, we want everyone to have an accurate understanding of how the lottery works.
Hi, Dan. The results on our Lotto America Drawing Results page are for Iowa tickets only. Here is the current verbiage on that page: "Below is a list of the number of winners for each prize level for Lotto America tickets purchased in Iowa." We'll add in a link to the page where you can see Lotto America results for the entire country if you would like. We do note on our website homepage at www.ialottery.com where the last Lotto America jackpot was won and the date that it was won. The information there currently states that the last jackpot was won on March 4, 2024, in Minnesota.
Posted by: Mary Neubauer | March 11, 2024 at 08:59 AM
On your drawing results page for Lotto America it shows no jackpot winner on 3/4 2024 when there was in fact a winner in Minnesota. Why is that? I believe this is the second time this has happened.
Posted by: dan king | March 09, 2024 at 09:13 AM