Montana Millionaire paid instant prizes far too often after a glitch. The vendor will cover the $608,600

The Montana Lottery's yearly Montana Millionaire raffle went on sale Sunday, November 1, and that morning it began handing out instant prizes at many times the planned rate. Of the 12,947 tickets sold that day, 991 won $100 and 1,019 won $500, a total of $608,600. The Montana Lottery says it will honor every one of those wins, and its vendor, Bally's Intralot, will cover the cost. Sales are postponed until further notice.

Intralot had moved the game to a new system and it ran into technical trouble right after launch. When it came back online, it set off instant wins far too often. “From my perspective, it was the worst scenario that we could have imagined,” said Lottery Director Bob Brown. He said the system had been tested to handle twice the load the game usually gets. Intralot said the disruption slowed transactions and kept purchases from going through, and that its teams have found fixes and are testing them with lottery staff.

The lottery's own prize table shows how far off Sunday was. The game has 720,000 tickets at $20, with 2,700 instant prizes of $500 (1 in 266.67) and 7,000 of $100 (1 in 102.86). That is one instant win per 74 tickets. On Sunday it was one in 6.4. Tickets amounting to 1.8% of the game took 38% of its $500 prizes and 30% of its instant-prize money. When sales resume, the lottery will add back the instant wins triggered Sunday, so later buyers aren't left with a thinner pool.

The big prizes aren't affected. Montana Millionaire is a raffle, and its winning numbers are drawn later by an independent, third-party verified system that isn't connected to the main lottery system. The lottery lists six $1 million grand prizes, 1 in 120,000 per ticket, drawn December 28, and a $250,000 Quarter Million Monday drawing on November 30. Anyone who bought a ticket should hold on to it.

Counting the instant wins and the $250,000 drawing, the game pays out $8.3 million of its $14.4 million in sales, about 57.6%, before the Sunday extras and a $20,000 second-chance drawing. That is well below the 75% average for $20 scratch-offs nationally on our data, though a raffle is built differently. Intralot has run Montana games for more than two decades, and its latest contract followed a fight over whether it would go to bid at all, which a legislative audit examined.

Sources

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