A semiretired bookkeeper has sued the Kentucky Lottery Corp., accusing it of falsely advertising how numbers in one of its instant-win games are picked.
Ronald B. Hub's lawsuit, filed in Jefferson County Circuit Court, seeks $1,000 in compensatory damages and $10 million in punitive damages.
It claims a promotional brochure by the lottery stated that the single-digit numbers printed on "Extra Cash" tickets are randomly generated. However, Hub says losing numbers were printed much more frequently even though he had used the same numbers each time.
The lottery denies wrongdoing. But it altered the brochure's language after Hub sued to say winners are randomly selected, rather than the one-digit numbers being randomly generated. Lottery general counsel William May said the wording was changed "to more accurately reflect the randomness of how the game is played."
"There was no intent to mislead," May said.
Hub said the difference is important because the odds of winning would be greatly enhanced if the digits were random. Jefferson Circuit Judge John W. Potter agreed with Hub on that point.
"Extra Cash" is based on the numbers a player chooses for a Pick 3 or Pick 4 drawing but does not depend on those daily drawings. It uses the player's numbers for a computerized drawing that instantly determines the winner.
Hub, an avid lottery player, said he figured that using the four digits on a Pick 4 ticket, he had at least a 4-in-10 chance of winning each time.
"It can't be randomly generated numbers, or they'd lose their shirt," Potter said in a pretrial hearing last summer. However, he told Hub that the lottery had sufficiently answered questions about how "Extra Cash" works.
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