Lotto South ends tonight; new game begins

Saturday, February 25, 2006 posted 05:06 PM EST



STAUNTON — The fat lady has started singing for Lotto South, a three-state lottery game that will hold its last drawing tonight before heading to that big ball hopper in the sky.

Due to dwindling sales, Virginia Lottery officials are pulling the plug on the game in favor of "Win For Life." Tickets for the new game go on sale Sunday.

With the hulking prizes of Mega Millions and Powerball routinely reaching into the $200 and $300 million stratosphere, in the end the smaller jackpots of Lotto South failed to inspire lottery players to open their wallets. The biggest jackpot ever achieved by Lotto South, which includes Georgia and Kentucky, was $27 million in 2005, according to Jill Vaughan, director of communications for the Virginia Lottery.

Recently, the pool of players was so small that when the lottery rolled over into another drawing, it found itself moving upward in just half-million dollar increments.

"We did the decimal point on the billboards, which was really interesting," Vaughan said. "No one's playing; sales have drastically decreased over the years."

Lotto South began in 2001 but accounted for less than five percent of Virginia's $1.3 billion take in lottery sales last year, the worst performing game in the state, Vaughan said.

Heather Lovern, an assistant manager at Deno's Subway on North Augusta Avenue, sees a fair share of Lotto South players but said, "It was mostly Mega, (Lotto South) never really gets that high."

In 2005, gaming officials began looking to replace Lotto South. With the help of focus groups working in the three-state territory, they decided on the "Win For Life" format where players try to correctly match six numbers from one to 42. The grand prize in the new game is $1,000 a week for life. The odds of winning are 1 in 5.2 million, better than the 1 in nearly 14 million offered by Lotto South and astronomically better than that of Mega Millions, which is 1 in 175.7 million.

"We expect 12 to 14 winners a year in Virginia," Vaughan said.

In a press release, Interim Executive Director Donna M. VanCleave added, "We wanted to find a game that could match Mega Millions for excitement, but also offer better odds of winning."

King James of Elm, N.C., a regular player of Lotto South and Mega Millions, said he enjoys the outgoing game and didn't mind the smaller jackpots. Clutching a Lotto South ticket he bought Friday afternoon at the Staunton Raceway on Richmond Road, he said, "I'd be just as happy with a million dollars."

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