Did your numbers win?  Did you see tonights results?  I remember when I used to play some of the various Iowa lottery and lotto games, so I decided to do some research tonight to see what games of chance were still in play.  I started by going the IALottery.com website.  On their homepage I saw several games including Iowa’s Powerball, Iowa’s Hot Lotto, Iowa’s $100,000 Cash Game, Iowa Pick 3, Iowa Pick 4, and a couple of the newest Iowa Lottery scratch tickets and pull-tab games (set for life, Pacman, and All In).  I don’t remember this many lotery games, so I dug a bit deeper.

One page on the site that was very helpful was the Lotto Drawings page.  This page gave the days and times when drawings occur for Powerball, HotLotto, the $100,000 cash game, as well as the Pick 3 and Pick 4 games.  In addition it mentioned the Iowa TV Stations where the drawings are broadcast (WOI, KWWL, KWCQ, KTVO, and KTIV).  On another page they also listed some of the current promotions, which currently includes a chance to win tickets to Adventureland in Des Moines as well as discounted tickets.

I really thought that the Iowa Lottery, and especially the Iowa Powerball would be some of the most popular lotteries in the nation.  Wow, was I off on this prediction.  A search for “lottery” in MSN Adcenter showed the following….

Florida Lottery - 66,000 searches last month
PA Lottery - 65,000
California Lottery - 43,000
Texas Lottery - 38,000
Ohio Lottery - 34,000

Iowa Lottery was the 42nd most popular search phrase containing the word “lottery” last month, with only 4,500 searches.  Even Powerball Lottery was searched more, with 4,800.  Out of curiousity, I searched “powerball” and found that it received 76,000 searches in June.  Iowa is one of more than 30 members of this multi-state lottery.

One interesting note on the iowalottery website was in the press release area where I learned that a $200,000 winning power ball ticket was sold at Hy-Vee in Marion, IA on July 12th of 2006.  The winner or winners of that prize have until midnight tonight to come forward or the ticket will expire.  Very exciting stuff…did you misplace that ticket somewhere?

Popularity: 21% [?]