Lotto makes a comeback with new game
A dollar at some stores may no longer get you a loaf of bread, but it can give you opportunity to win some easy money. Starting tonight, lotto is back and there is even a new game to increase your chances of winning. Jose Sanchez found out the details.
Jose Sanchez, Reporting
This familiar sound has not been heard since the last century. Everyone speculated what might have happened to Lotto. Did they get bitten by the infamous Y2K bug? No one knows, but starting tonight Tropical Gaming promises to continue making people’s dreams come true.
George Swift, Consultant, Tropical Gaming Company
“At the end of December, while the machines remained functional, the company felt that expenditure on repairs and maintenance were too high. I should say here that those machines were capable of working even after January first, 2000. They were in a way compatible. What the company sought to do was to get rid of these old machines and procure modern, more efficient machines. The intention was to provide for wider market coverage. Lotto was operating with less than fifty machines, now the company has doubled the number of machines we have. This makes for wider coverage nationwide.”
Another major hindrances of pulling off a successful draw was the fact that the couriers for the company were robbed on several occasions, not of money, but of disks that contained information for the game’s database.
George Swift
“There will be no need under this new system for agents, couriers to be going on the streets to collect data disks. We will be operating under a system called Store and Forward, meaning that the material at the agents countrywide will be forwarded directly through telephone lines to Lotto’s head office on Bishop Street.”
“Lotto is introducing a new game. This game will be run daily Mondays through Saturdays. It is fashioned off the pick three, after the popular pick three that obtains in the United States of America and through North America. We feel that this will be quite an attractive game and we hope the customers will like it.”
But for those of you who prefer the regular Lotto, Tropical Gaming has decided to bring it back with more than a meager twenty-five thousand dollars.
George Swift
“The prize again will be seventy-seven thousand, five hundred dollars. That is made up of three separate prizes: there are two bonus draws for five thousand dollars each, and there is the regular grand prize for sixty-seven thousand five hundred dollars. I might mention here that in the event no one wins the three prizes, management proposes to offer one grand prize for next Saturday at eighty thousand dollars. This is purely promotional to get the thing going back.”
Tickets for the games can be purchased at Lotto’s office and at their agents throughout the country. You can see if your three lucky numbers made it in the Bel-3 tonight at nine, right here on Channel Five. Reporting for News Five, Jose Sanchez.
If you still have a Lotto ticket from December twenty-ninth, 1999 with the letter “A”, you can receive a free ticket for Wednesday’s draw.
