When you find yourself with a winning lottery ticket — whether a gift, random purchase or part of your investment program — the first thing you want to know is how much you won.
I certainly would, anyway — if that were ever to happen to me.
For quite a few people who play the Fantasy 5 game, however, picking the right numbers has proven easier than finding their winnings in the lottery feature on Page A2 of the Sentinel.
That was Marge Pastor’s situation. “For the past two days,” she explained, “the payoff for Fantasy 5 has been incorrect.”
She’s not the only one with that complaint. I get similar calls nearly every week. People will compare their Fantasy 5 tickets with the winning numbers on Page A2 and find that they’ve matched three — or maybe even four — of the numbers drawn.
Once they’ve composed themselves, they head to their neighborhood gambling emporium to collect their winnings.
When they arrive, however, they are offered less than what they saw in the newspaper. And, invariably, they report being told, “The Sentinel gets those numbers wrong all the time.”
Not quite.
It’s true that the newspaper’s reporting of winning numbers has not been infallible. Five times last year — once in February, twice in May and once each in September and October — the Sentinel reported incorrect winning numbers for Fantasy 5.
One of those resulted from incorrect numbers sent to the newspaper by a wire service. Once an editor transposed the dates of two successive days’ drawings. Twice, in haste, someone typed in wrong numbers. And once an editor inadvertently used the winning numbers from Georgia’s, instead of Florida’s, drawing.
So, of 365 drawings, the published winning numbers were wrong 1.36 percent of the time.
The published payouts, on the other hand, have been on the money, so to speak.
Still, if readers regularly find the published results difficult to understand, that’s a sure sign that there’s room for improvement.
The lottery feature on Page A2 lists the games and the dates of the drawings in bold type and, next to that, the winning numbers. Because the drawings occur late at night, though, the payouts are not available in time to appear in the next morning’s newspaper. Those arrive the following day and appear in the Sentinel the day after that.
By then, though, another Fantasy 5 drawing has occurred. So, atop the previous day’s winning numbers and its payouts, the new winning numbers appear.
The problem occurs when readers find that they have matched numbers in that most-recent drawing, then skip down to the payouts from the previous night’s drawing and mistakenly think that’s how much they have won.
You can imagine how that works:
They race out to the convenience store or their local market — already spending the money in their heads — only to find frustration. The clerk explains — usually erroneously — that it’s the newspaper’s fault, and that’s when the phone at the Sentinel starts to ring.
The listing is almost always accurate — it’s even quite logical — but someone like Marge Pastor, excited about having won oodles of cash, quite understandably may find it confusing.
Should the Sentinel make the lottery-payout listings more gambler-friendly?
You bet.
