"New" Game in Illinois

It's been almost a quarter century since the Illinois Lottery has introduced a new game. Granted, Lotto has been changed a few times since then. Little Lotto's gameplay has not only changed, but so has it's name (beginning as Cash 5, and now called Lucky Day Lotto). But it hasn't been since 1988, when the afforementioned Cash 5/et al game was launched, that Illinois has introduced an entirely new game.

That changed Sunday with the introduction of My3. To play, one must select a three-digit number between 000 and 999. If that sounds familiar, that's because they didn't actually introduce a actual new game, they just added another Pick 3! Granted, it's a sort of "beginner's" version of Pick 3, but why did they have to create a whole new product? They could have just as easily made "beginner's" play slips for Pick 3, and added a new play option to provide multiple prize levels. By the way, I completely forgot about the multiple prize levels in My3.

Apparently they can call this a "new" game because there are multiple prize levels: matching all 3 in exact order wins $200 on a $1 play, matching any 2 in order wins $4. If you match all 3 in a jumbled order, you win $40; unless your number has repeating digits, then you win $100. But that begs the question: what happens if one picks all of one digit (i.e. 000, 777)? Does the player win both the exact and repeating prize, or just the exact order prize?

If you're confused, that just goes to show what a failure of marketing this is. If this was added as a new "ez-win" option to Pick 3, I'd give it a solid B+. But a whole new product? I guess Northstar (the private firm running the lottery) had that idea of adding this to Pick 3, and then they realized "Hey, we haven't introduced a new game since 1988; let's just make this it's own game." There was a lot of speculation on Lottery Post that the new game would be 5-digit game like PA's Quinto. And as bad as that game would have been, it still would have made more sense to add than this: what essentially amounts to another Pick 3. Pointless.

Ohio: Ten-Oh out, Pick 5 in.

The Ohio Lottery is starting up a new game called Pick 5. If you've heard of Quinto in Pennsylvania, you already know how Pick 5 will work; the only difference is that Ohio will offer 50 cent bets along with one dollar bets. It will be drawn twice daily; the first drawing will be held August 12th. The evening drawing will be shown live on TV; pushing the Rolling Cash 5 drawing off-air, and online.

Ohio apparently only has room for 5 in-state games, because Ten-Oh will be ending the day before, on August 11th. Ten-Oh is a keno-style game, and from what I know it was never that popular of a game. But in my opinion, this is a bad deal for players. Ten-Oh isn't a perfect game, mind you. It has top prize odds of more than 8 million to 1, almost as much as Classic Lotto. Plus, it's a computerized game; meaning no ping-pong balls. But, it's a lot easier to win money with Ten-Oh, with overall odds of about 1 in 9. Five-digit, single number games are very hard to win. It will be 92 times harder to win any money with Pick 5; and that's only if you go for a box play with 5 unique digits. So all in all, this is a downward move.

EDIT 7/9/12: Small grammatical errors fixed.

Lotto on the NES?



Courtesy: Destructoid

Yeah, this really happened. In 1991, Control Data Corporation and the Minnesota State Lottery teamed up and came up with a system that allowed players to play the lottery on the original Nintendo Entertainment System. Players could play numbers games as well as instant games right on their NES, and all they had to do was connect the system to a specially provided modem and pay a $10 monthly fee to use the service.

Sounds like another one of those cool ideas which went all the way to prototype stage, and the bottom fell out at the last second. Except, the bottom didn't fall out; this system was actually put into use in real homes, 10,000 of them to be exact. This pilot program was considered successful, but legislators raised concern about the program encouraging children to gamble. After all, the Nintendo was largely considered to be a children's toy. The program was eventually scrapped for this reason, and was one of the last nails in the coffin for Nintendo's long-standing efforts at an online network for the NES.

But even if underage play wasn't an issue, this system was probably destined to fail anyway. The NES was about to be superceded by the Super NES and the Sega Genesis, among other systems, which would have required new hardware. And most importantly, the biggest opponent to home lottery would probably have come into play at some point, the Federal Government. The Feds have often used the 1961 Wire Act to shut down any kind of online wagering scheme, even legitimate ones. Even if underage play and the next generation of home game consoles didn't put an end to this program, Washington probably would have, even though it was restricted to within Minnesota.

As far as I know, this would be the last time a state lottery allowed players to wager from home. That is, until March of this year; when Illinois began online sales of Mega Millions and Lotto.

Play All The Numbers!

Every gambler has tried to gain an edge over the house, and lottery players are no exception. Boards like Lottery Post are full of people trying to predict what is supposed to be unpredictable. Of course, there is no sure fire way to make sure you pick all of the winning numbers on one line. But there is a way you can pick all of the numbers, winning and losing, and spread them generally equally over several lines. You can do this by going to random.org, and clicking on the "Sequence Generator" link (shown below).

You will see a screen like this. Simply put the field of numbers in the area highlighted in blue, and the amount of numbers you pick in the column area (highlighted in green).

Check it out! You have every number in field laid out, in random order, ready to pick. This is a quick easy way to make sure you've got every number working for you.

Plus, this will increase your chances of winning a prize; though on the flip side, it also makes it a lot harder to win multiple prizes.

Back From The Dead...

Does that make this blog a zombie? I don't know, but yes, this my first update in about two years. Why has it taken so long? The primary reason has been school and the extra-curricular activities involved therein. But another reason has been because I felt like I couldn't give this blog the attention it deserved. Unfortuately, those feelings led me to give The Lotto Geek no attention at all.

I'm probably going to do things a little bit differently now; first off, game reviews will probably be graded on a more subjective scale (to be determined later) as opposed to just a gut feeling.

Second, I will be going through more traditional outlets to get the word out about the site (in other words, advertising). I just need the money to do that, but you can't make money without spending money (which is the whole point of the lottery, isn't it?).

And third, I probably won't be putting up any more of my game ideas, because I'm pretty sure that lotteries have been stealing my ideas. Just compare my Hi-Lo game with Ireland's All or Nothing game, and tell me they aren't essentially the same game. Only difference, I came up with the idea long before they did.

Beyond that, I'm going to try to keep up with this site on a more consistent basis. One update a week is better than 7 updates a week for a month, and then nothing for 2 years. Hope you keep checking in over the next few days, and I look forward to hearing your comments.

The REAL reason lotteries like RNG

Random Number Generators. They are, for many reasons, the bane of many lottery player's existance. In some cases the complaints are enough to make you believe that the complainer is a member of the frequent buyer's club at Ty's Tin-Foil Hat Warehouse. But there are just as many good reasons for hating these things, one of which is that they have proven to be problematic, and those problems can go on unnoticed indefinitely.

For example, when ball machines screw up and have problems, they're easy to spot, because ping-pong and rubber balls, and the machines that mix them, are completely tangible. If there's a crack in the ball, you're going to see it, and you can rectify it quickly. That isn't always possible with RNGs, because you can't easily spot a "crack" in a computer program's code. Case in point, when problems came up with California's and Tennessee's RNG, they were not noticed and fixed until some keen-eyed players noticed the problem many draws later. These problems kept some players from winning, and these problems would not have occurred if the lotteries in question had stuck with ball drawings. The lotteries obviously did not want this to happen, as at least in Tennessee, this proved to be a PR nightmare. But none of these lotteries have switched back to balls despite the bad press. Why is this? Are they really trying to screw players? Are they rigging the draws and just got caught? No, frequent buyer of tin-foil hats, but the real reason, as I have figured out, isn't that much better. The reason is, they're lazy.

Yeah, they're lazy.

You see, RNGs are a lot easier to use. No inspecting balls, no loading balls into the machine for the test draw, not loading balls for the real draw. All officials have to do is sign a few names, clip a few seals, make a few mouse clicks, and just like that they have numbers. That's the real reason a lot of lottery directors like these things, and that's the real reason the use them. Lost sales are, in their eyes, perfectly justified if it means less work for them and as long as the sales drops aren't catastrophic, lottery directors won't be getting any pink slips from the governor. After all, they get most of their sales from scratch-offs anyway.

New game idea, the first of (hopefully) many.

Introducing the lotto game, HiLo!

O.K., this is isn't being introduced anywhere, it's just an idea for a game had. And no, this has nothing in common with the Price is Right pricing game of the same name.

So, how do you play HiLo, if it could indeed be played? Well, very simple. All you have to do is pick 10 numbers from 1 to 20 (that's right, you pick half of the numbers in the number field). And if you match all 10 numbers, you win the grand prize. And here's what makes it unique, if you match no numbers at all, you also win the grand prize. This is possible becuase the odds of matching ten of ten, and the odds of matching zero of ten are the same. You also would win prizes for matching 7 or more numbers, or by matching 3 or fewer numbers. That's why it's called "HiLo." You win for having a "Hi" number of matches, and you win by having a "Lo" number of matches. So, as long as don't match 4, 5, or 6 out of 10, you would be a winner.

Here's a sample prize structure:

Match	Prize	Odds
10 or 0	$10,000	1:92,378
9 or 1	$100	1:923.8
8 or 2	$10	1:45.6
7 or 3	$1	1:6.4
Overall Odds 1:5.5

So, what do you think? Leave comments below.

Japanese Lotto Prologue

When I posted the article on lotteries in Japan a couple of days ago. Well, I missed something important in that post, how they draw the numbers. The machines they use are not anything like you've ever seen. First, let me show you what they use to to draw the Loto 6 and Mini Loto.

First the balls are manually fed into a sphere. Then, the machine works by first mixing the balls in the sphere at the top of the machine. Then the balls are poured unto a plate below. The plate then spins profusely like a centrifuge, mixing the balls further until one gets captured. The drawn ball is then placed on a rack, and the plate begins to spin again. The process is repeated until all the numbers are drawn. If you want to see this in action, click here to see it in action via streaming video.

The machine used to draw the Numbers games is even stranger. First, wheels are spun, which seem normal enough. But to actually select the numbers, the machine then shoots arrows (that's right, arrows) at the wheels, and whatever the arrow lands on will be the winning digit. If you want to see this in action, click here to see it in action via streaming video.

日本語ロト (Japanese Lotto)

Thanks to the wonder that is Babel Fish, I am able to decipher to many lotteries around the world. Keep looking back for more world lotteries in a series I will name at a later date.

You would think that a place like Japan would not have lotteries so similar to those here in the U.S. But, they are in fact very similar, they have two digit games, a pick 5, and a pick 6. The digit games are the same run of the mill games you see in many states, except for one key difference, the payouts are pari-mutuel, which is how it's also done in California, Massachusetts, and New Jersey. Plus, the two games (called Numbers 3 and Numbers 4), only pay out 45% of sales overall toward prizes, which is lower than most such games here in the states. Other than that, it's all the same, so no real story here.

The Loto 6 game is the big game in Japan, though it isn't nearly as big as other lottos in other countries. This has a lot to do with the fact that it only has 43 numbers to choose from, as opposed to, say, 49. And when the people in one of the world's largest economies all share a game that has such good odds, there are bound to be a lot of winners, and there are. There is almost always a top prize winner, and it's not uncommon to see more than 5 in one draw.

That all may seem like a impediment to rollovers, but they figured out how to make rollovers happen despite all the winners with a rather complicated rule. What they do is limit the amount that can be won to 200 million yen (or approximately US$2,000,000), and then put any jackpot monies in excess of ¥200,000,000 into the jackpot pool for the next draw. That next draw will also have a winnings limit, but it gets upped to ¥400,000,000 (or about $4 million US). That higher limit will continue as long as there is excess jackpot money, with the limit being lowered once there is draw where the jackpot pool is depleted.

And now, some facts about Loto 6:

• Tickets are 200 yen each (or about US$2)
• Pick 6 out of 43
• Drawings every Thursday at 6:45 pm Tokyo time (or 4:45 am Eastern time).
• Winnings to single winner are capped 200 million, or 400 million yen if money was carried over from the previous draw. Any jackpot money in excess of the limit will be carried over to the next week's draw.
• Prize and odds table is below:

Match	Prize in ¥	Approx. Prize in US$	Odds
6	About ¥100,000,000	US$1,000,000	1:6,096,454
5+Bonus	About ¥15,000,000	US$150,000	1:1,016,075.7
5	About ¥500,000	US$5,000	1:28,224.3
4	About ¥9,500	US$95	1:610.3
3	¥1,000	US$10	1:39.2
Overall Odds 1:36.81

Japan also has a pick 5 game called "Mini Loto". It is a far simpler game to explain because it doesn't have any complicated jackpot limit rules. It's a simple pick 5 out of 31, with a sixth bonus ball for second prize. It also appears to put a greater percentage of sales to the jackpot than Loto 6.

• Tickets are 200 yen each (or about US$2)
• Pick 5 out of 31
• Drawings every Tuesday at 6:45 pm Tokyo time (or 4:45 am Eastern time).
• Prize and odds table is below:

Match	Prize in ¥	Approx. Prize in US$	Odds
5	About ¥10,000,000	US$100,000	1:169,911
4+Bonus	About ¥150,000	US$1,500	1:33,982.2
4	About ¥10,000	US$100	1:1,359.3
3	About ¥1,000	US$10	1:52.3
Overall Odds 1:50.2

Well, there you go, that's Japanese Lotto. Leave comments if you have questions.