Monday, at 12:59 p.m., you can start cashing in on Cash 3, the newest
Arkansas lottery game. You could potentially turn one dollar into 500 as the lottery expands from scratch-offs and Powerball to Cash 3 with numbers drawn in state.
"I lost a couple of times, so I kind of backed off it a little bit, but I still tried," says Demarcus Franklin. Franklin might not play the lottery religiously, but lots of his customers do. "They come in and compete with each other with their winnings," he explained Sunday.
Franklin says several people drop by just to buy tickets, and he's banking on the new Cash 3 drawings to draw in even more business. "They also have the drawings for 50 cents. A lot of people come in and buy the dollar scratch-offs, so I know they'll be very interested in the dollar lottery with good odds at winning," he said.
There are better odds than
Powerball. "Wednesday, it'll be $77 million. The odds of hitting that jackpot are one in 195 million. Here, the odds of hitting a straight pick three are one in a thousand," said Arkansas Lottery Director Ernie Passailaigue.
Passailaigue explained how you can choose from a combination of 50-cent and dollar bets or do a quick pick. "The horse races, the dog races, you can set up win, place and show. You can have a box. It's the same concept here, except you're bidding on numbers instead of horses," he said.
Passailaigue says Arkansas is pulling lottery sales from border states, and Franklin's customers come from those neighboring states all the time to buy lottery tickets. "We don't have too many people complaining. They all say, they lose, they're putting another kid through college," said Franklin.
The lottery uses a random number generator to pick Cash 3 numbers every day at 12:59 and every night, except Sunday, at 6:59.
