Yellow balls spun in a clear acrylic container and spit out the three winning numbers -- 5-6-6 -- that netted players a total of $56,330 as the Tennessee Lottery debuted its Cash 3 game Monday night.
About 500,000 people played the first Tennessee game where they could choose their own numbers, which was enough to please lottery chief executive Rebecca Paul.
"I'm real comfortable with this," she said with a glass of wine in her hand as she stood among a crowd of about 50 lottery officials, television station managers and others sipping tails and munching on hors d'oeuvres at WKRN-TV, which aired the first of the nightly drawings.
"This is a game that normally starts really slow and grows," Paul said.
Sportscaster John Dwyer, who announced the numbers and will serve as the public face of the online game, rated his performance during the 56-second show as a B-plus.
"It was OK. I'm not used to people watching," he said with a grin before stepping off the set.
The two sixes nearly threw him, because they look so much like nines and he stumbled slightly over the word "claiming" but quickly recovered.
Security on the new set was intense, with half a dozen people making sure only authorized people were near the machine that held three bubbles full of yellow rubber balls marked with black numerals ranging from zero to nine.
The balls began spinning seconds before the drawing went on the air, then one by one dropped into the appropriate slot.
Moments after the winning numbers were announced, auditors and others huddled in a corner near the locked cage where the Cash 3 machine is kept to check on the payout and certify the process.
The first Cash 3 tickets went on sale at 6 a.m. Monday morning and stopped at 6:20 p.m., with the winning numbers chosen eight minutes later at the Nashville station. The drawings also air on stations in Memphis, Jackson, Johnson City, Knoxville and Chattanooga seven nights a week.
Mike Thorpe, manager of an Exxon TigerMart in downtown Nashville, said Cash 3 sales had been slower than he expected.
"It's a learning process, so I'm sort of glad," he said, adding that rainy weather may have kept some potential players at home.
Paul said there was a possibility that on a per capita basis sales were better than the first day of the Cash 3 game in Georgia, where she previously headed the lottery.
Prizes range from $40 to $500 on an investment of 50 cents to $1 per ticket. Players who miss the drawings can check the lottery's Web site or call the hot line at 877-786-7259 to find out if they've won.
Jana Moore of Nashville bought $20 worth of tickets at the Exxon, using her two children's birthdays to put together what she hoped would be some winning numbers.
She buys scratchoff tickets once a week and decided to try Cash 3 on the first day "just for fun."
"I think it's great having the lottery, as long as the money gets to education where it belongs and as long as everybody watches how they spend," she said.
Cash 3 will be the only "online" game available until Tennessee joins the multistate Powerball this summer, but the lottery dventually could offer several similar to those sold in other states.
The lottery is already more than halfway toward its goal of $88 million by July 1 to fund scholarships for an estimated 65,000 students expected to attend Tennessee colleges and universities next fall.
The lottery also will launch two new scratchoff games Tuesday -- Cash Blues with a prize of up to $20,000 and Tic Tac Toe worth up to $2,500.
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