A Leominster woman won $500,000 on a $50 Massachusetts scratch-off ticket

A Leominster woman won the $500,000 top prize on a Massachusetts State Lottery scratch ticket, the lottery said.

Angela Tarr hit the top prize on $500,000 Frenzy, a $50 ticket, and chose the cash option, a one-time payment of $355,000 before taxes. She plans to put the money toward her family and savings. She bought the ticket at Family Farms, 202 Merriam Ave. in Leominster, and the store gets a $5,000 bonus for selling it.

Her win was the 15th of the game's 50 top prizes. Thirty-five are still unclaimed.

The game is built differently from most $50 tickets. It has only five prize levels, and the smallest one is $100, so any winning ticket pays at least twice what it cost. There is no break-even prize at all.

That structure puts most of the money in the middle. The $100 prizes alone account for 59% of everything the game pays out, and the fifty $500,000 prizes add up to under 8%. The odds of any win are 1 in 3.78, and the odds of the top prize are 1 in 161,280.

The game holds about $327.6 million in prizes across a print run of roughly 8.06 million tickets, or $403 million in sales. That is a payout of 81.2%, and it rates 72.7 on our ValueScore™, the highest of the three $50 games Massachusetts sells. The other two carry far bigger top prizes, including the $25,000,000 Mega Money game that a trust claimed $25 million on this month.

The top prizes are going at about the pace of the tickets. About 35% of the $100 prizes have been claimed since the game launched on May 12, and 30% of the top prizes have. That leaves 35 of them spread through about 5.2 million tickets.

Sources

WWLP: Leominster woman wins $500,000 Mass. Lottery scratch ticket prize

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