Missouri Lottery players will get a new numbers game Monday, but also lose one.
"Show Me Cash," a daily on-line drawing, is set to begin Monday when the twice-daily and struggling "Show Me 5 Paydown" game goes out of business.
Lottery spokesman Gary Gonder said the new Pick 5-style game would offer players bigger jackpots and better odds of winning.
The top prize in every Paydown drawing was a tax-free, lump sum $50,000. But if no player won that prize, cash trickled down to increase the amounts of lesser prizes awarded in the same drawing.
If no one wins the daily Show Me drawing the top jackpot will be increased by $5,000 and roll over to the next day's drawing, much like the twice-weekly multi-state Powerball game. Each new Show Me jackpot will start at $50,000.
Gonder said about a dozen people annually won the top Paydown prize by correctly picking five of five numbers drawn. The Show Me game is mathematically designed to create around 33 winners a year, with awarded top prizes expected to average $150,000 (minus taxes of course).
The chances of winning in the new game improve because its pool of numbers is reduced to 39 from 44 used in Paydown.
Gonder said the overall odds of picking any winner — or letting a computer pick them for you — would go from 1 in 11 to 1 in 8.77.
"The Paydown game was not performing," said Gonder. In recent years he said the average number of players in the 14 weekly drawings had slipped from 480,000 to around 340,000 while annual sales fell from $25 million to around $18 million.
"We thought we could arrest this decline and change the game," he said.
One thing that won't change is the price of the game: $1 per play.
The winning numbers for the new game will be presented on the Missouri Lottery Results page at Lottery Post (www.lotterypost.com/results/mo) following each 6:45 pm drawing.
More details are available, including a prize and odds chart, on the Lottery Post Event Calendar.
A sample play slip for the new Show Me Cash game from the Missouri Lottery.
"In recent years he said the average number of players in the 14 weeklydrawings had slipped from 480,000 to around 340,000 while annual salesfell..."
And that, kids, is how you get rid of a lottery game that is lousy. You 'petition' your money to stay away from it.
i like it when the lottery makes changes due to player response... lol
:-)
They probably noticed that other states were making more money with their 5/39 games.
When Ohio had a 6/49 +1 game with a starting jackpot of $4M and that rolled $1M every drawing, they replaced it with the lousy game Lot'O Play which they said was better and in response to players when actually they were losing money with the old 649+ game, the payout were too large. A year later they got rid of Lot'O Play and replaced it with a "classic" version of the 649 game which they said was better and in response to players. This time the starting jackpot was $1M and it rolled $100K ever drawing.
They never tell players they replaced a game to increase profit. Next year PowerBall is going to change its matrix when Florida joins which will have better odds of winning 0+1 a $3 prize but winning the jackpot is going to be a lot harder but the story is going to be they've made the game better for the players because the odds of winning a prize are better and the jackpots will be larger.
It probably didn't help that people on the MO/IL side could cross the border and play a 5/39 game and get a shot at a jackpot that started at twice as much.