Today Tim purchased eight of Virginia Lottery's Money Mania scratch-offs at $5 each, and didn't win one cent!!! $40 completely wasted. Ugh, we feel SO upset by this. The ticket clearly states that there is a 1 in 4.44 chance of winning any prize. What a rip-off! It was very disheartening to buy a strip of eight tickets and have there not be one prize of any amount on any of them.I purchased one $20 ticket today: Virginia Lottery's $120 Million Cash Blowout. I won $20. At least I got my money back.
I don't even know what else to say. We may take a break from purchasing Virginia Lottery tickets this week.
Congratulations on your great blog! And good luck to you as you enjoy the games from the Virginia Lottery. My name's Jean and I have worked at the Virginia Lottery for 20 years; right now, I work in the communications department. It's fun to see players excited about the various games we offer. In reading through your posts, we saw one from late January regarding Money Mania. So sorry to hear about your disappointment with that game. You mentioned that you bought eight consecutive tickets without a winner. Perhaps we could explain Scratcher odds of winning a bit better for you.
ReplyDeleteLottery employees sometimes hear the question, "If the overall odds of winning a prize in a Scratcher game are 1 in 4, why didn't I win when I bought 5 or 10 tickets?"
The overall odds of winning are established when a game is printed and are calculated by dividing the total number of tickets printed by the total number of prizes available. For Money Mania, there were 4,080,000 tickets printed with 919,332 winning tickets. Divide 4,080,000 by 919,332 and you get 4.38, which we rounded to 4.4. Overall odds of 1 in 4.4 do not guarantee a winner every fourth ticket, or even every eighth or tenth ticket.
The Virginia Lottery and most other state lotteries use the same formula to determine the MAXIMUM number of consecutive tickets without a win. We have used this formula for 20 years. The formula is to multiply the overall odds by 3, then round down the answer to the nearest whole number. Using this formula, there could be up to 13 consecutive tickets without a win in Money Mania.
When Scratcher tickets are printed, prizes are distributed through other computer-generated formulas. Although a particular string of 5, 7, 10 or 12 tickets may not produce a winner, another string of tickets could produce several winning tickets.
This is how eight tickets in a row without a win will happen sometimes - and is part of the game rules.
We enjoyed reading about your experiences with purchasing Virginia Lottery tickets. The lottery is fortunate to have such loyal fans; we hope that you always have fun playing. Even if you purchase a non-winning ticket, please know that approximately 33 cents of each dollar goes to Virginia's public schools, K- 12. Last year, that meant $455 million to our schools.
If you ever have questions regarding the Virginia Lottery, please feel free to call 804-692-7778 Monday through Friday, 8:30 a.m. - 5 p.m. The Communications Department is always happy to talk - and listen.