After just one week of sitting on shelves at Massachusetts State Lottery retailers across the state, the “Billion Dollar Extravaganza” scratch ticket — which costs $50 — has awarded over $30 million in prizes, according to Interim Lottery Director Mark William Bracken.
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There have been five tickets worth $50,000 claimed from the game since Feb. 7, according to Bracken. The lottery’s site states there have also been 56 tickets worth $20,000 claimed, and 57 $10,000 tickets claimed as of Feb. 15.
The “Billion Dollar Extravaganza” scratch ticket’s highest prize is worth $25 million, which is the largest Massachusetts State Lottery prize offered in history. There are three total $25 million prizes available to win on the scratch ticket, and the odds of winning a $25 million prize are 1 in 10.08 million. As of Wednesday, none of them had been claimed.
“Billion Dollar Extravaganza” tickets are also offering five $2 million prizes for players to win, along with 15 $1 million prizes, 150 $50,000 prizes, 2,340 $20,000 prizes and 3,180 $10,000 prizes available to win.
The lowest prize available to win on the scratch ticket is $100, with the odds of winning being 1 in 4.55, according to the site. The overall odds of winning any prize on any ticket are even better, Bracken said.
“It’s 1 in 4.10, the odds of the winning tickets,” Bracken said. “There are a lot of winning tickets, and I think that’s what keeps players going.”
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Of course, there’s always the chance of not winning a prize at all.
Bracken stated he’d visited several different Massachusetts State Lottery retailers in person over the past week to observe how the new $50 “Billion Dollar Extravaganza” ticket has been performing.
“It’s selling itself; I go in a lot of stores and I linger there for about 15, 20 seconds,” Bracken said. “There hasn’t been one time in the last week — and I’ve probably been in 25 stores — where someone wasn’t talking about the $50 ticket or buying and scratching the $50 ticket.”
Though the director said the lottery can’t track the exact number of individual tickets sold so far because the lottery counts its ticket sales by its “books” of tickets distributed, Bracken said he has been impressed with the lottery’s “Billion Dollar Extravaganza” ticket sales.
“In the first week, we’ve sold just shy of $40 million worth of tickets,” Bracken said. He added that the lottery paid out over $30 million in “Billion Dollar Extravaganza” prize winnings to more than 200,000 people, and the highest prize claimed so far is $50,000. More than 186,000 people have won the $100 prize, Bracken said.
The lottery’s site states there are still approximately 6.45 million remaining $100 tickets up for grabs in the game. There are also 700,000 remaining tickets for prizes that range in value from $500, all the way up to the three available $25 million prizes, as of Wednesday.
As of Feb. 15, there have been 1,157 tickets worth $600 or more claimed from the game, and 222,170 tickets claimed in total from the game, according to the lottery’s website.
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Bracken stated Massachusetts has been long overdue for the release of a $50 lottery ticket, especially being the original creator of the first-ever scratch ticket. The Bay State’s previously most expensive scratch ticket sold by the lottery was $30, and had first been introduced almost 10 years ago in 2014.
Other states, like Texas, have already released a $100 scratch ticket on their markets. Bracken said, “We were a little bit behind — but we wanted to make sure we did it right.”
The lottery had been considering the release of a $50 ticket in Massachusetts for about seven years, Bracken explained, and had been testing the ticket’s success in “focus groups with agents and players” during that time.
“We wanted to make sure the prize value was there for our players. We wanted to make sure we had the best ticket we could put out there, the best chances to win certain prize amounts,” Bracken stated. “We wanted, really, what was going to be the most beneficial to the player.”
“Looking at how our other instant ticket sales have been going, especially the higher price points — the $20, the $30 tickets, we thought, ‘Now is the right time to offer a $50 ticket to see how it does in the market,’ and it is doing extremely well,” Bracken said.
In addition to the $50 ticket’s record-breaking prize values, Bracken stated there’s another special way for “Billion Dollar Extravaganza” players to win money.
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“We have a huge ‘Second Chance’ prize component — it’s the first time we’ve ever done this,” Bracken said. “It’s 10 ‘Second Chance’ drawings; each drawing is going to be triggered when we sell 10% of our tickets,” the lottery director explained.
“Each drawing has $750,000 in prizes, so it’s a total of $7.5 million that’s going to be given out in ‘Second Chance’ prizes, which is historic for the Massachusetts lottery. The prizes go up to $50,000 in the ‘Second Chance’ drawings,” Bracken said.
There have already been approximately 175,000 people entered into the first “Second Chance” drawing, Bracken said. “Players are really taking advantage of that because if they lose, they have a second chance to try to win. The odds are actually pretty good in terms of winning a second chance prize,” he added.
The lottery director is very optimistic the high sales of the “Billion Dollar Extravaganza” ticket will continue, but stated the lottery can’t be sure how successful the ticket will be in the weeks to come until it has more time to analyze ticket sales.
“There will be some new players that might buy a single $50 ticket as a novelty item, because it’s the new flashy thing out there. But I think a lot of our player base on this $50 ticket will be people converting from the $30 ticket over to the $50 ticket. Our $30 ticket sales will probably go down, as will, maybe, our $20 ticket sales,” Bracken said.
“That being said, this will significantly help us towards our end of fiscal year goals,” Bracken stated.
In Nov. 2022, Bracken had stated the lottery had concern over whether it would meet its end of year fiscal goals for 2023. According to Bracken, at that time, the lottery sales were $22.5 million less than what they were for the fiscal 2022 year.
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“Whether or not it pushes us over the top to beat last year’s record setting sales, I don’t know. We are hopeful that it will, and this, combined with our new monitor game [we launched last month] called ‘Wheel of Luck’ that’s been very successful so far; that’s also helping us reach our end of year goals,” Bracken said.
“Wheel of Luck” replaced what Bracken called a “very stagnant game” the lottery had named “All or Nothing,” and in its first month, it has amassed over $5 million in sales for the lottery, Bracken said. “All or Nothing” would have brought in approximately $800,000, Bracken added.
“Combined with ‘Wheel of Luck’ and the ‘Extravaganza’ ticket, we’re pretty optimistic that we should be able to have another record-breaking year in sales for a third year in a row,” Bracken said.
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