It was red faces all round at the Illinois lottery company last week.
About 3,000 duplicate quick-pick lottery tickets were issued!
Now that’s embarrassing.
[It was a software problem and only affected players in Illinois, USA]
How Could This Happen?
Lottery terminals were being upgraded over the weekend, and part of the software upgrade process caused a problem with quick pick numbers not being cleared down properly.
So the next quick pick ticket printed got exactly the same set of numbers!
It was swiftly fixed, but not before 3,000 duplicate lottery tickets were issued.
Now 3,000 out of over 6 million tickets doesn’t sound like much of a problem. (It wasn’t 3,000 tickets all the same after all – but 3,000 each of which were identical to one other ticket)
And only 340 or so ‘duplicate’ small prizes were actually won, so the Illinois lottery is playing the incident down.
But Seriously
This was a pretty serious error though. For two reasons.
Firstly, consider those people who bought 2 quick pick tickets. That’s likely to be those 340 who got ‘duplicate’ small prizes, as not many people buy the same lottery numbers twice! The rest of the 3,000 duplicates were likely issued to the next person in the queue – more on that one in a moment…
So if we assume all of those 340 people intended to buy 2 lots of different quick pick tickets – doesn’t that mean they’ve just been cheated? Because they actually only played half as many combinations as they requested. Which HALVED their chances of winning!
To put it another way. What if that second set of quick picks they never received had actually included the winning combination..?
That’s pretty ugly.
But It Could Have Been Even Worse
Nobody with one of the duplicate tickets actually won the jackpot. If they had, sure they’d have been happy enough – but there would have been a lawyers free-for-all to follow!
Because what if you didn’t get issued a duplicate quick pick ticket, but won the jackpot legitimately – with numbers that also happened to get issued to a duplicate ticket holder..?
You’d now be sharing your jackpot either with the person who was behind you in the lottery queue!
Or two other people – the one who happened to buy a genuine quick pick with the same winning numbers as you, plus the person who was behind them in the lottery queue.
Either way, your jackpot would be a lot smaller as a result. And the lottery company even redder in the face, and potentially in the pocket too.
The Illinois lottery are offering to refund those customers affected. But those duplicate ticket holders that understand the real implications of what just happened may not be willing to lie down quite so easily.
The Take Away Bit
If you buy multiple quick pick tickets, do a quick check before you leave the counter – just to make sure the numbers are different between tickets.
It’s very rare for a glitch like this to happen, but it only takes a second to protect yourself before the draw is made.
Has anything strange ever happened when printing your lottery ticket?
It is really disturbing. Hope it will not happen in future.
I recently had a lottery ticket that copied 4 of my 6 numbers for the Mega Millions. Then it happened again. Only this time I played my own numbers then my Quick Pick numbers copied 3 of my numbers. I’m starting to believe it’s this one store I go to close to my job. It really feels set up for me to lose, because every time this happens I lose and don’t get a single number. Might be rigged?!?
Quick pick tickets are just random numbers so there’s every chance they can be the same as some other numbers you manually picked. If that couldn’t happen then they wouldn’t be random (see George and the Infrequency Illusion).
I have these numbers 60/20/23/26/79 for which I would like to know the next numbers coming, if you can give me an answer in an hrs time, thank you.
OK, so when.
Oh, so you’d like the winning numbers, and 17 minutes later I’m taking too long to provide them for you..!?
You’re on the wrong website Kendy.
This doesn’t have anything to do with the post, or even the Illinois lottery.
Back in 1993 I was playing the NY Lottery TAKE 5 game. I had two tickets with two numbers hitting on each of the two tickets. The agent fed them into the lottery terminal and the terminal printed out two free play tickets with the same exact five numbers. It turned out that both of the free plays were losers for the next days draw. I did take pictures of those tickets. What would you guess the odds would be of that happening?
Nice example. It’s a shame they weren’t both winners though. 🙂
Not sure if the number of balls has changed since ’93, but the odds of it happening now are 1 in 575,757. Because that’s how many combinations there are for this game.
It’s an interesting question because it sounds like it should be a lot higher. And calculating the odds of a specific combination being drawn twice is much higher. But here one ticket has to be printed before another one can be the same… so at that point in time the second ticket can be one of any possible combination (of which there are 575,757 in a 5 from 39 game). So those are the odds of it being the same one.
It’s like rolling a dice. If you’ve already rolled a 6, the chances of getting 6 again are 1 in 6. But before you roll at all, the chances of getting two 6’s in a row is 1 in 36.