20% of players contribute 82% of lottery revenue in the USA — disproportionately are low-income, minority men who have less than a college education. That has fueled a vociferous anti-lottery movement. “It really is government undercutting what government’s role should be,” which is encouraging people in financial straits to be responsible with their money, says Tom Grey of the National Coalition Against Legalized Gambling.
About one-half of American adults spend $45 billion annually on some 35,000 lottery games in 40 states, plus the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands.
The Ocean Pines (MD) VFD has announced it is selling 1600 tickets for a chance at their $100,000.00 jackpot.
The Florida Lottery is busy with behind-the-scenes preparations for Powerball. Tickets go on sale in Florida on January 4th. The first drawing is January 7th.
Lottery spokeswoman Jackie Barreiros says computers are getting software downloads so they’ll be able to sell the tickets and workers will be putting up Powerball billboards in the coming weeks.
When Florida joins the game, Powerball will include 30 states, Washington, D.C., and the Virgin Islands.
Barreiros says Florida’s preparations are right on track so far. She says the state is trying to get the word out about how the game works and how you win.
Jackpots currently start at $15 million, but that will be increased to $20 million when Florida players start buying tickets in January.
Barreiros says the Lottery Department expects Lotto sales to drop off when Powerball begins, but the agency is confident players will come back to Lotto. She says workers will be pulling down Lotto billboards and replacing them with Powerball signs, but that doesn’t mean Lotto is going away.
Each Powerball ticket will cost $1. You’ll have an option to pay an extra $1 to multiply the non-jackpot winnings.
The odds of winning the jackpot are 1 in 146 million. Good luck!
The audit of the Kentucky Lottery showed that the lottery brought in $778.2 million — up about 4.6 percent from the previous year — but its profits were down about 2.7 percent.
According to the Maryland Lottery, instant scratch-off sales are up almost $45 million from this time last year, and overall lottery sales are up by almost $10 million during the first 10 months of this year.
Nobody won the top prizes Wednesday in Washington’s Lotto or Hit 5 games, so Saturday’s jackpots will rise from $2.5 million to $2.8 million.
None of the tickets sold for Wednesday’s Hoosier Lotto game matched all six numbers drawn, so the jackpot grows to an estimated $5 million.
The jackpot in the Florida Lotto game has grown to $14 million after no one matched the six winning numbers in the latest drawing, lottery officials said.
A total of 59 tickets matched five numbers to win $6,073.50 each; 3,982 tickets matched four numbers for $73 each; and 80,344 tickets matched three numbers for $5 each.
The winning Florida Lotto numbers selected Wednesday night: 4-19-29-32-44-49.
There has been another rollover in the grand prize for the Illinois State Lottery’s Lotto game – to $18.75 million.
The rollover occurred because no player matched all six winning numbers from Wednesday night’s $18.5 million drawing.
The next Lotto drawing will be Saturday night.
The New York Lottery’s latest raffle-style game, the Turkey Raffle, was drawn today, Thanksgiving Day, and made five instant millionaires.
New York’s Turkey Raffle is a raffle game offered by the New York Lottery, with a limited period of availability and a limited number of $10 tickets.
Tickets went on sale Nov. 3, and ticket sales were to stop Nov. 26 or earlier if the supply of tickets ran out.
The winning numbers were announced at 10:00 AM this morning, Nov. 27, 2008.
Each raffle ticket contains a unique, nine-digit number issued sequentially across the state from the Lottery’s central computer, starting with number 100000000.
