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Lottery tickets go on sale today
By Derek Hodges
Jackson County residents will have their first chance to buy North Carolina Education Lottery tickets today (Thursday), beginning at 6 a.m.
Sales of scratch-off tickets were scheduled to begin this morning at 14 Jackson County businesses, including the Catamount Travel Center in Cullowhee and Cherokee, Cody’s Hot Spot, Farley Super Track, Moonshine Mini Mart, Enmark, Aztex, Elders Superette, Cashiers Exxon, two Mountain Breeze Marts, Pop’s Country Store, and Mountain Energy Shell in Sylva and Cherokee.
To participate, retailers had to have lottery terminals installed by N.C. Lottery officials and attend a half-day training session. Businesses that are open 24 hours may start selling the tickets at 5 a.m., and others could opt to open early to accommodate what is anticipated to be a big demand.
Local residents can buy lottery tickets in Jackson County for the first time today (Thursday) at 14 area retailers, including Sylva’s Mountain Breeze Mart, above. Scratch-off tickets will go on sale at 6 a.m., with numbers games set to begin in a few months. – Herald photo by Nick Breedlove
Tickets on sale today will include four types of instant-win games.
Two, North Carolina Education Lottery and Tic Tac Toe, cost $1 per ticket. The NCEL game has a top prize of $5,000 and requires players to find at least three matching amounts on a ticket. The background on tickets for that game will feature three scenes from across the state, including Fairfield Lake in southern Jackson County. Tic Tac Toe will be a variation of the classic game of the same name.
Blackjack tickets cost $2 each and have a maximum payout of $21,000. In that game players will scratch to reveal “hands” of cards, with the goal being to beat a “dealer’s hand” at the top of the card.
Among the scratch-off games, Carolina Cash has the highest price and potential cash award, at $5 and $100,000 respectively. In that game, players must match one or more of 15 numbers on the right side of the card with any of four numbers on the left side of the card.
According to lottery officials, bigger cash prizes will follow during the coming months. Sales of a $10 scratch-off ticket are expected to begin soon, while the state will begin Powerball by the end of May. With states across the nation participating in Powerball, which requires players to pick six numbers and a power-ball number, recent jackpots have been as high as $355 million.
Lottery officials expect to begin North Carolina-based numbers games in the fall. Those games will ask players to enter three, four or five numbers into a computer terminal. Nightly drawings will be broadcast on statewide television networks, and jackpots could be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, according to information on the lottery Web site.
The site also describes how winners would receive their payout. Lottery participants who win $25 or less will have the option of receiving that money in cash or tickets from the retailer. Those winning $25 to $599 will be able to claim their prize in store money orders, gift certificates, merchandise, or tickets, also paid by the retailer. Larger prizes of $600 to $99,999 may be claimed at the regional lottery claims center in Asheville, and winnings of $100,000 or more will be paid at the state claims center in Raleigh.
With legislation signed into law last August by Gov. Mike Easley, North Carolina became the 41st state to establish a lottery. Lawmakers followed a trail blazed by surrounding states in establishing the games to benefit education. North Carolina has been a non-lottery state surrounded by states with a lottery and was also the only state on the East Coast without one.
The lottery has faced some scrutiny, but a lawsuit challenging the way it was passed was thrown out by a Raleigh judge last week.
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