Crossword #3212 Remains Aloft

The top rated game went through almost 300,000 tickets this week and all three of the remaining Grand Prizes remain available. Your odds of winning a $50,000 Grand Prize are one in 363,000. Twenty percent of the Top Prize money remains outstanding with only 7% of the tickets available for sale. Normally, this would place the game in the "hard to find" category but with an initial float of 15 million and no sister version of the game also on sale, I'm thinking that you should still be able to find these tickets without much difficulty.

The game has a small prize return rate ( prizes up to $30) of 56.1% which is the fifth best of any game currently for sale. Apart from the three $50,000 prizes there is also 1 of 9 $25,000 prizes and 1 of 6 $10,000 prizes  outstanding.

Top Rated Games

1. $3 Crossword #3212 - Best Top Prize ratio. 
2. $3 Scrabble #1861 - Climbing back up the ratings; only 1 Grand Prize left. 
3. $3 Fruit Explosion #1866 - Selling like hot cakes and looking good. 
4. $30 Golden Treasure #1782 - Top small prize return ratio. But, $30? Gulp. 
5. $3 Keno #1417 - Well positioned to move up. 

Games to Avoid

1. $1 Lucky Lines #1826 - Why do I dislike this family of games so much?
2. $1 Red Hot 50's #1827 - 1,647 $50 Prizes outstanding. That's all I can say. 
3. $1 Hit 100 #1849 - Not the best of times for $1 games.
4. $4 Cash For Life #1171 - a one in 2 million chance to win a GP. Waiting.....
5. $5 Cross Tripler #1846 - Lost 2 Grand Prizes this past week. 

Games Devoid of Grand Prizes

• Lucky Lines

Comings and Goings

New for play this week is the $2 Double Dollar. The game sheet has yet to be posted so I will reserve my commentary for next week. Retired this week is the Interprovincial game Classic White. The game had been listing for some time and was devoid of Grand Prizes for a few weeks. Tough to pay $10 for a super Grand Prize of which there are none available. There were still over 2.5 million tickets available for sale at its point of demise. Definitely not a winner for the OLG and its sister organizations. I wonder if it has been retired in all other jurisdictions?

Overall, eight Grand Prizes were won this past week. That's a high number. The biggest sellers (relative to their float size were Fruit Explosion and 7 11 21, each of which sold 9% of their respective floats. Each game remains readily available.

Personal Play

Nothing to report.

Post Script

We weathered the storm of our common critic. There were calls to delete his comments and I came very close to doing so. Thanks to those who posted thoughtful responses to his insulting commentary. Somewhere within his insults were some comments that deserved to be expressed. The poster is going to have a tough life if that is how he intends to influence people. Folks that angry south of border are likely the ones supporting Mr. Trump.

I received a message while preparing this entry from a reader asking the following:

For the Keno scratch tickets. I’m convinced that every number scratched is at least somewhere on the

game at least once and at most twice. My friend thinks she’s had games where the number was nowhere

on the game board.

The question delves into the area of the algorithm used by the supplier. For Keno, my sense is that numbers can appear more than once and can not appear at all but I have not measured that with any precision. Comments are welcomed.

Thanks to CL66 for posting his "OLG Insider" information. I am always interested in the retailer comments. I am of the view that focus group comments can have a significant impact on the decisions taken by an organization. A customer could call or write to the OLG repeatedly about a point without result. Your views would be ground into dust by the Customer Service machinery. Seeing the same comment on this report would have much more impact so I would encourage readers to make any views that you have known to your local retailer. Who knows, maybe you'll see them on the next report.

This week's article comes from the staid publication, Canadian Lawyer Magazine:
http://www.canadianlawyermag.com/5942/Ontarios-big-gaming-gamble.html .

I have ranted about the OLG's Modernization Plan many times before. It's interesting to see how business planning works. The OLG puts together a report with myriad assumptions and concludes that by selling off all of its assets it will return an additional $1 billion to the Provincial coffers annually. When the assumptions all prove to be false it's too late to reverse course. The OLG can then fall back on changing conditions as its excuse. The truth is that the OLG wanted to privatize its operation. As simple as that. I would respect them more if they had just said so instead of trying to mask the medicine with clap trap.

The last shoe will fall when the new casinos operated by the private corporations begins to establish returns. The OLG currently earns 75% of the profit on its operations. In the "Modernized" world a private company will invest in plant and, of course, be entitled to a reasonable profit. The risk will be taken by the Province. Its share of the pie will be reduced to 40-45%. The assumption is that 40% of a larger pie will be greater than 75% of a smaller pie. We shall see. My question is, "Who has skin in the game?" Certainly not the authors of the plan and that is disturbing.

Happy March to all.


Doug