'For the high-rollers': Florida lottery now has a $50 scratch-off game. Who's buying?
LAKELAND — As Charlene Gumble sat at the counter of the Lake Morton Market and Deli on her lunch break, she delayed consumption of the sub sandwich she had just bought.
Using a dime as her implement, Gamble began scratching away the coverings on seven rows of numbers on a black-and-pink Florida Lottery ticket. Gumble has been playing scratch-off games for decades, but the ticket she held Thursday was one that wasn’t available until recently.
The ticket, 500X The Cash, is the first scratch-off ticket in Florida costing $50.
Did Gumble hesitate to spend half a C-note on a game of chance?
“No,” she said casually. “That’s my lunch money.”
Gumble soon determined that her $50 expenditure had brought no winnings.
The new 500X The Cash ticket promises a maximum prize of $25M
The Florida Lottery introduced the $50 game in late February, marking an increase of 66.7% in price over the most costly scratch-off tickets previously available, a pair of $30 games.
The new 500X The Cash ticket promises a maximum prize of $25 million — the largest amount ever offered in a scratch-off game — but the state is printing only two tickets with that payout. The odds of winning that top prize are one in roughly 21.4 million.
The $50 ticket also offers the potential for prizes ranging from $100 to $1 million. The Florida Lottery reported that three players claimed $1 million prizes last week, most recently a Plant City man who opted for a lump-sum award of $820,000 rather than deferred payments totaling the full prize amount.
The new ticket shows how much Florida’s officially run gambling enterprise has evolved since the state introduced its first scratch-off ticket in 1987. Florida voters approved a ballot measure the previous year to allow a lottery after state officials promised that the revenue from sales would bolster funding for public education.
Joining other states
That first game, Millionaire, sold for $1. Thirty-five years later, why is Florida now selling a $50 ticket?
In considering new products, the Florida Lottery uses “market research, industry performance standards, product specialists and contract gaming vendors,” spokesperson Meredyth Hope Norrman said by email.
“When evaluating the introduction of a $50 price point Scratch-Off game, we learned that these tickets not only had success in other states, but that the purchase intent expressed by some Florida Lottery players could translate to increased revenue transfers for education in Florida,” Norrman said.
Florida Lottery Secretary John F. Davis does not need approval from the governor or the Legislature to introduce new games or increase the price of tickets.
Most states have adopted lotteries since the 1980s as a source of government revenue. At least six other states sell $50 scratch-off tickets, according to the website Lotto Edge. Texas offers six instant games at that price.
While the Florida Lottery has continued to sell an array of $1 scratch-off tickets, the state added a $2 scratch-off ticket in 1993 and introduced its first $5 game five years later. The top price for an instant game leaped to $10 in 2002 and then to $20 in 2004 with the Gold Rush game.
The first $30 scratch-off game, called $600 Million High Roller, debuted in 2008. The state rolled out another $30 ticket, Fastest Road to $1,000,000, in 2020 but did not push the price threshold higher until the release of the $50 ticket on Feb. 28.
Lakeland resident Michael Wilson was invited a few years ago to join Flamingo Forum, a private online group the Florida Lottery consults for research on its games. Wilson said the state began raising the possibility of launching a $50 scratch-off ticket last year.
The eventual release of 500X The Cash has generated “a lot of buzz” in online discussions among regular players, Wilson said. But he hasn’t joined the rush to buy the $50 tickets.
“I would never buy one,” Wilson said. “It’s too rich for me. Those are for the high-rollers.”
The state lists the overall odds of collecting a payout of any amount on the $50 ticket at one in 4.5. That means that, statistically speaking, more than three of every four tickets sold are losers. (The Florida Lottery also offers a second-chance drawing for non-winning tickets with prizes of up to $25,000.)
The state promotes the Florida Lottery as a boon to education
The state promotes the Florida Lottery as a boon to education, reporting that revenues have produced more than $41 billion in funding for schools and students. But the state Legislature has revised the funding formula over the years, using lottery money as a substitute for education funds moved to other areas of the budget.
The amount of money transferred to the Educational Enhancement Trust Fund has not come close to matching the growth in lottery revenue, which has averaged more than 10% a year. A study from the 2017-2018 fiscal year found that the amount of money from lottery ticket sales had declined from its original 39% to 26%, the Florida Education Association reported.
Lawmakers have used lottery money for such budget areas as college scholarships, building programs and a school recognition program, as well as for day-to-day operations rather than instructional programs, as Treasure Coast Newspapers reported in a 2017 investigation.
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Is it worth it?
Clerks at two Lakeland convenience stores said sales of the $50 ticket have been steady but not spectacular.
Hardy Chokshi, owner of Super Stop Food Store on Lincoln Avenue, said he sometimes sells as many as 10 or 15 of the highest-priced tickets on Fridays, the day many workers receive paychecks.
“Some people like it, and some people look at it like, ‘Oh, the risk of $50 — I might not get it back,'” Chokshi said. “Some people try because they buy the small ones and they win $100 or something and they just want to try it at least one time to see how it is.”
Chokshi displays a certificate from the Florida Lottery attesting that his store sold a ticket last September that yielded a $1 million prize. That jackpot came on the Fastest Road to a Million ticket, which costs $30.
Tickets costing $20 or $30 remain much more popular than the 500X The Cash ticket, Chokshi said.
“The $50 scratch-off, only certain people can afford; not everyone can,” he said. “Some people still hesitate to spend $50 on just one. They prefer to scratch four or five different ones and have more chances to win than just one ticket.”
M.D. Hossain, working the counter at C&O Food Mart on Central Avenue, estimated that he sells three to five of the $50 tickets a day. Hossain, who also works at another convenience store, said he has cashed in plenty of $100 winners on those tickets.
Hossain was asked if any customers seem to spend more than they can afford on lottery tickets.
“It depends on the mentality of the customer,” he said. “Some, they play like they don’t care, and some, they play a little.”
A private Facebook group, Chasing Scratch-offs Florida, is devoted to reports, observations and tips from frequent players. One member recently posted the question: “Are the $50 tickets worth it?”
The query had drawn 102 comments as of Tuesday afternoon, with a substantial majority answering in the negative.
“I have a hard time throwing away 5 bucks, much less 50. To each his own,” was one response.
Another member answered, “No no no,” and added a GIF image of dollar bills swirling down a toilet bowl.
One commenter reported having won four times in 60 tries on the 500X The Cash game.
“I thought they were (worth it),” another man wrote. “I thought I was doing pretty good this month. I have won $500 twice, a hundred a handful of times and a $1,000. I thought I was way ahead until I checked my bank statement and realized that just since the 1st of the month I've spent OVER $3,000.”
He added: “I just kept seeing everyone else on here winning big and was just hoping that I was next.”
Indeed, the group’s feed includes plenty of posts from members sharing photos of winning 500X The Cash tickets. In most cases, the payoff is $100, but some reported winning as much as $1,000.
Respectable gambling?
Arnie Wexler, a certified compulsive gambling counselor, served for eight years as executive director of the Council on Compulsive Gambling of New Jersey. Wexler, a recovering gambling addict, said that lottery tickets add to the risk of abuse for people with a genetic inclination toward excessive gambling.
While living in New York in the 1960s, Wexler said, he spent $50 to $100 a day on lottery tickets, in addition to money he spent in daily trips to a horse racing track. He said he was stealing to support his gambling habit while earning only $60 a week.
“There were people that would go in and buy $100, $200 a day in tickets, even on $1 tickets,” Wexler said. “So $50 is not something that changes the gambling addiction. Because if you're addicted, my head tells me I would rather, as a gambler, buy 50 $1 tickets than one $50 ticket.”
Wexler said he’s more concerned about the emergence of state-sponsored gambling, first through lottery drawings and instant games and recently with the spread of legalized sports betting. He said that many who spend excessively on lottery tickets don’t consider that act to be a form of gambling.
“The real problem is this: You’ve got people that have the gene to be addicted, compulsive gamblers, and they would never gamble on anything that was illegal,” Wexler said. “Now they make lottery legal, and people that have that gene are gambling on the lottery and becoming addicted gamblers.”
Wexler said that some compulsive gamblers only play the lottery, while others gamble in various ways.
Wexler, who served on the Council on Compulsive Gambling of New Jersey from 1976 to 1984, said he successfully pushed the state’s lottery commission to print the phone number for a gambling addiction hotline on its tickets, making New Jersey the first state to do so.
Norrman, the Florida Lottery spokesperson, said by email that the agency “builds responsible gaming best practices into all aspects of our operations.” She said the agency makes a priority of educating players on gambling responsibly through year-round advertising efforts and a dedicated website (playersguide.flalottery.com).
The home page for the Florida Lottery’s website only contains a small logo at the bottom saying “Play Responsibly 18+” in reference to the minimum age, while the page abounds with promotions for scratch-off games and news of jackpot winners. A column on the page displays tweets from the @floridalottery account, and the one showing Tuesday afternoon said, “Not winning is part of playing the Lottery. Don’t assume that you can earn back the money you have already lost. Know when to stop.”
The tweet notes that March is Problem Gambling Awareness Month.
The Florida Lottery prints the “Play Responsibly 18+” logo on the back of all scratch-off tickets, along with the toll-free number for the Florida Council on Compulsive Gambling (888-ADMIT-IT, or 888-236-4848).
Asked if offering a $50 scratch-off ticket might prompt some to spend too much of their income in search of the $25 million jackpot, Norrman wrote: “The Lottery’s mission is to maximize revenue for the enhancement of education by providing the best Lottery games available. Florida’s diverse population requires a vast and diverse mix of products to meet the wide-ranging needs and interests of the consumer market.”
Gambling hotline
For help with a possible gambling problem, call 888-ADMIT-IT (888-236-4848).
'Their last penny'
A 2011 paper published in the Journal of Gambling Studies concluded that the poor are the leading purchasers of lottery tickets. Another report, published in 2010 in the Journal of Community Psychology, found that lottery outlets are often situated in neighborhoods with high percentages of minority residents, according to a summary from the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School.
Larry Mitchell, founder of New Life Outreach Ministry in Lakeland, said he has no doubt that many lower-income residents spend more than they should on lottery tickets. Mitchell’s ministry supports transitional housing and prison re-entry services.
“Many people will spend their last penny on a lottery ticket; I know some who are just so faithful,” Mitchell said. “I see white people there, too, but I know in the Black community it’s a serious thing. It's almost habitual.”
Mitchell said that in his childhood, before the Florida Lottery existed, games of chance were popular in mostly Black neighborhoods. He recalled that many residents regularly played a game they called “Cuba,” based on its apparent nation of origin, that involved picking three numbers in hopes of matching those chosen in a random draw.
Some adults chose numbers based on interpretations of dreams, Mitchell recalled, and he said neighbors often asked him for details of his own dreams. Many Blacks with low incomes saw the Cuba prize as their best hope for escaping poverty, he said.
Fellow Lakeland resident Annie Phyall said she has noticed steady streams of customers going into convenience stores in predominantly Black neighborhoods and coming out holding lottery tickets.
“If you just park there, you’ll see the people come out with a handful of them tickets,” said Phyall, a retired teacher. “And I just wonder, ‘How can they afford this?’”
Phyall said she has occasionally asked regular lottery players why they spend so much money on the games.
“A guy came by the other day and sat on my front porch and was talking to me about it,” she said. “And he was telling me he's lucky maybe twice a year. So they just take a chance because they think that’s the only way they’ll ever get any money. They can't work and they don't have the skills or any other way to get that kind of money, so they figure if they gamble, they’ll eventually get rich.”
Gumble, the lunch-break ticker buyer at Lake Morton Market and Deli, said she used to be a manager of a convenience store and became familiar with the habits of lottery players.
“Even as a convenience store manager, you just wouldn’t believe — they’ll get their VA (Veterans Affairs) check or their Social Security check and just, boom, right off the bat buy a book of tickets,” she said, referring to an entire roll.
Gumble said that while sitting at the counter with her lunch, she had seen another customer spend $700 on scratch-off tickets — without success, based on his reaction.
Hossain, the convenience store clerk, said that lottery ticket sales rise 30% to 40% during tax season. Some customers receive federal income tax refunds and spend much or all of the money on scratch-offs, he said.
“So the government gets their money back — ‘I will give it to you, but I’m going to get it back,’ ” he said with a cackle.
Gary White can be reached at gary.white@theledger.com or 863-802-7518. Follow on Twitter @garywhite13.
This article originally appeared on The Ledger: 500X The Cash Florida Lottery: Who's buying new scratch-off game? Top prize: $25M
