In today’s edition of the D.C. Register, the District government outlines guidelines for “Smokin’ Hot Dice,” a new scratch-off ticket game being introduced by the D.C. Lottery. It’s a pretty simple game that is offered in other states. In short, the scratch-off costs $2, every ticket “wins” something ($1 is the minimum), and the big reward is $1,000. The chances of a player pulling in that grand prize? 0.00000 percent, of course!
Okay, so that’s not really fair — the table in the register just rounds off the extra decimal place, as the chance of winning the grand prize is actually 1 in 240,000, or 0.000004 percent. (So, you know, there’s a chance.) The odds aren’t much better for any other prize: in fact, the only prizes in the game that players have over a half-percentage point chance of pulling in are those netting $5 or less.
But hey, on the bright side: players have over an eight percent chance at losing half of what they paid to play the game.
