This week the Arkansas Lottery rolled out five new scratch-off tickets.
These instant tickets are in addition to the five that the Lottery unveiled last month.
The new tickets cost anywhere from $1 – $20 each.
The new tickets are:
- 10Xtra ($1 with a top prize of $5,000)
- 20Xtra ($2 with a top prize of $25,000)
- 50Xtra ($5 with a top prize of $100,000)
- 100Xtra ($10 with a top prize of $250,000)
- 200Xtra ($20 with a top prize of $500,000)
As we have said before, scratch-off tickets are controversial, because they are tied to problem gambling and gambling addiction.
A 2015 study in Canada described them as “paper slot machines.”
A 2018 study published in the Journal of Behavioral Addictions also found a link between how often a person played scratch-off tickets and the severity of a person’s gambling problem.
Expensive scratch-off tickets like the new $20 200Xtra ticket are especially controversial, because they encourage people to wager — and lose — large amounts of money at once.
These types of tickets prey on the poor and desperate.
They use large jackpots to entice people to play the lottery.
Players who buy scratch-off tickets will lose their money anywhere from 66% – 80% of the time.
Despite these facts, the Arkansas Lottery still relies very heavily on scratch-off tickets.
The vast majority of the money from the Arkansas Lottery’s scratch-off tickets pays for prizes for lottery players. Very little of the money funds scholarships.
To put it simply:
As long as the state-run lottery depends on scratch-off tickets and spends most of its money on prizes, it will never provide as much funding as possible for Arkansas’ college scholarships, and it will prey on Arkansans.
