Could this be a move to all-computerized drawings — and the death of real drawings — in Illinois?
After 20 years of perky hosts and ping pong balls, the future of live Illinois Lottery drawings on WGN-Ch.9 is up in the air.
Lottery officials said Tuesday they are considering parting ways with WGN-TV, home to daily drawings since 1994, when the current one-year contract expires in June. Advances in lottery technology, an influx of new games and the move by Tribune Co. to pull the evening drawings off of national cable channel WGN America in February are playing into the decision.
The company hired to run the Illinois Lottery continued its fight to keep some documents under wraps, arguing their release would violate its contract with the state and expose company secrets to competitors.
At a hearing before the Illinois Court of Claims, Northstar Lottery Group argued today that lottery officials have no duty to release a marketing study and a business plan even though the Illinois Attorney General has advised the documents should be made public.
The firm asked the court — a quasi-judicial body of seven appointed judges who hear disputes involving...
A Pennsylvania man mistakenly threw $1.25 million worth of winning lottery tickets in the trash.
The guy, it goes without saying, was pretty upset.
"Wouldn't you be," said Wendy Hinton, who works at Zhou Grocery on South Queen Street in York.
On March 13, 2013, she sold 25 Quinto tickets — numbers 4-3-4-1-8 — to one of her regular customers, a man who, at the time, lived a couple of blocks from the corner store. She remembered because he played the same numbers every day — their significance, not known — and always bought a bunch of tickets with the same numbers — sometimes 20, other times 25 — among his daily lottery purchases that totaled about $100 a day.
Anti-gambling groups say an Illinois Lottery smartphone app makes playing too convenient and tempting; convenience store owners say it hurts their customer base.
A lottery player scanned his tickets at a Shirley, New York, convenience store called JackSpot! and when the screen flashed "BIG WINNER," he told the cashier, "The machine is broken."
