Glitch in Montana Millionaire: 2,000 Tickets Unexpectedly Win

A malfunction at the Montana Lottery on Sunday (November 1) caused instant-win prizes to be paid out about 11 times faster than expected. A payout obligation of more than $600,000 arose for technology supplier Bally's Intralot.

Officials halted sales of the Montana Millionaire game around 11 a.m. By that point, 12,919 tickets had been sold, and 2,010 of them were instant winners. According to lottery director Bob Brown, this means roughly one in every six tickets was a winner. The targeted odds, however, were one in 74.

Despite the malfunction, the lottery said it will honor all tickets. Of these, 991 are worth $100 each and 1,019 are worth $500 each. The total payout will be $608,600.

The game has drawn strong interest in Montana. Tickets went on sale at 5:30 a.m., and some people lined up at gas stations before sunrise. Everyone who buys a ticket also enters the main drawing on December 28, which has six prizes of $1 million each. Winning an instant prize does not remove a player's entry in the main drawing.

The malfunction began about 30 minutes after sales opened, when error messages such as "Processing not permitted" appeared on terminals statewide. The lottery links the problem to a new central game system supplied by Bally's Intralot and launched in September. Brown said the system had been tested at twice last year's peak demand, but it could not handle the large number of transactions arriving at the same time.

The game offered 720,000 tickets at $20 each. That is 100,000 more than last year, when all tickets sold out in a little over six hours. The lottery said it will replenish the prize pool so that players who buy tickets when sales resume still have a chance at instant prizes. Bally's Intralot will bear the additional cost.