Tired of $1 dreams? Here comes a $50 lotto ticket

Monday, May 07, 2007 posted 10:28 AM EDT

AUSTIN — It used to be you could dream big in Texas with a buck.

Now, Texas Lottery officials are hoping to sell bigger dreams — for $50.

That's the price of the state's newest scratch-off game, the $130 Million Spectacular, which will go on sale Monday and offer nearly $134 million in prizes, including three grand prizes of $5 million.

Texas is joining Kansas and Michigan in offering the highest-priced scratch offs in the nation, lottery data indicate.

Kansas introduced a $50 ticket two years ago. Michigan will introduce its $50 ticket Monday.

Compare that to California, where the most expensive scratch-off ticket is $5; New Jersey, where it's $10; and Indiana and New York, where it's $20.

Officials in Texas evidently believe their new game will do well. They're printing 3.7 million of the $50 tickets and planning to introduce a second $50 game.

"We're breaking new ground here," said Robert Heith, a spokesman for the Texas Lottery Commission.

Keith Whyte, executive director of the National Council on Problem Gambling, said the introduction of higher-priced games reflected the "an arms race" among states for gambling dollars.

After Texas voters approved the creation of the state lottery in the early 1990s, the agency sold its first game, a scratch off called Lone Star Millions, for $1 per ticket. Players now can choose among online games and 80 or so popular scratch offs, which have become the agency's meat and potatoes, generating $2.8 billion in sales last year.

The agency offered its first $3 scratch-off in 1997. By 2000, it had a $10 game; a $20 game in 2002; and a $30 game in 2004. Last year, $1 tickets comprised just 11 percent of all scratch-off sales, while nearly a third came from tickets priced from $10 to $30.

The $50 ticket comes with a 63 percent chance of losing.

Put another way, players have a 1-in-1.2 million chance of winning a $5 million grand prize, a 1-in-618,000 chance of winning $1 million, and a 1-in-nearly-7 chance of breaking even.

Those odds won't deter Mike Swain, 44, a driver for a moving company who picked up $4 worth of scratch offs at a convenience store in East Austin earlier this week.

"I'll try it. I definitely could try it once," he said when he learned of the $50 game. "Sometimes I have $50 extra."

Swain, who estimates taking home between $1,800 and $2,000 a month, said he plays scratch-off games daily, plopping down anywhere between $4 and $6 at a time. "Something in my mind says, 'You're going to hit it one day.'"

Predicted Rick Bark, a clerk at the store where Swain bought his tickets, "People are going to buy it."

Gerald Busald, a math professor at San Antonio College who analyzes lottery practices, had this advice for those itching to wager 50 bucks on a single ticket: Don't.

"You can have the same dream for $1 that you can for $20 or $30 or $50," he said, adding, "You're not going to win."

Of course, it's the exceptions that fuel the dreams that last year pulled in a cool $3.8 billion from all the Texas lottery games, of which about $1.1 billion went to public education.

If all tickets are sold, the new $50 game would net $52 million after the commission pays out $134 million in prizes.

Before launching it, the Lottery Commission surveyed frequent scratch-off players to see how much they'd be willing to gamble for a single shot. But it didn't examine player income levels to find out if likely buyers would be those least able to lose $50, and didn't examine how the games might affect problem gamblers.

"Scratch-off tickets are an impulse purchase, and $50 is a lot of money for the state to have its citizens wager on an impulse," said Rob Kohler, a lobbyist for an arm of the Baptist General Convention of Texas, which opposes gambling.

Heith said his agency had one overriding mission: "What we do is run a business for the state of Texas.... We have to produce products that our players want to purchase."

And high-priced games leave frequent players giddy.

William Scott, 64, a custodian in Austin who works two jobs and said he often spends $120 a day on lottery games, is eager to try his luck on the $50 game. "I play all of them," he said.

Tina Pritchard, 47, a clerk at a San Antonio floral shop who estimates spending between $40 to $50 a day on scratch offs, can't wait to put $50 on the new game.

"I'll try it a couple of times and see how it goes. If I don't win on the first one, I might buy a second," she said. "I play a lot of scratch offs. I scratch like crazy."

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