The D.C. Lottery will begin selling tickets for a new, short-term raffle today that has considerably better odds of a large payout than most other lottery games. The D.C. Millionaire Raffle will sell a fixed number of 250,000 raffle tickets at $10 a piece, each pre-printed with a six-digit number, from now until August 22, 2007 (or until all tickets are sold). One top prize of $1 million will be awarded after a drawing, as well as three $50,000 winners and 100 $1,000 winners. Odds of winning $1 million are 1:250,000, with 1:83,330 odds for the $50,000 prize. By comparison, the odds of winning the jackpot for the Hot Lotto contest are 1:10,939,383, and 1:607,744 to win $10,000.

The Washington Times reports that D.C. Lottery’s Quick Cash game was recently canceled after a single person won an improbable $1.5 million payout, which helped put the game more than $640,000 in the red for the year. While the new raffle could conceivably net the lottery over $1 million in profit, it also carries a risk if significantly fewer than 250,000 tickets are sold, since payouts to winners are guaranteed.

D.C. Lottery paid out $146.6 million in prizes last year, the highest since its inception in 1982. It also generated $73.8 million for the city’s general fund, which goes to benefit education, parks, police, housing, senior and child services. Jeanette Michael, executive director of the D.C. Lottery, told the Times she hopes to increase lottery sales from $265 million to $300 million this year.