HOW DOES IT WORK?

The lottery player would order online lottery tickets like they normally do, but now with PoolingPLUS™, the player would have the option to tell the lottery retailer to "Pool it!" The player would pay an additional dollar and their ticket would now include a pool of 10 more plays designating that the bearer of the ticket was entitled to a 10% share of the pool.

MECHANICS

Using an example of a pool size of ten plays, the online gaming system would internally generate and store one or more pools of ten plays each, and each pool would be assigned to a unique pool number. When a request is made for pooling, the gaming system would assign the ticket to one of the pools that was created, print the 10 plays on the ticket and increment the ownership of the pool by 10 percent. Once the pool has been assigned ten times it would be closed since it would be 100% full. If no pools are open when a request is made, the gaming system would generate its next pool. (See illustrations below).

The base system creates and fills pools one at a time unless the lottery wants to allow more than one pool to be purchased. By the time of the drawing, the lottery may have sold tens of thousands of pools and only the last pool could possibly be partially filled, so the number of open tickets would be negligible, $9 or less. There are several ways to make sure the final pool is filled. The simplest is to cutoff the creation of new pools at an earlier time than the regular cutoff time so the remaining positions would get filled. The earlier cutoff time may only need to be 15 minutes. Other alternatives are to pay for the unfilled positions out of the marketing budget and use the open positions as part of a promotion; use the unclaimed prize fund; or arrangements could be made with specific beneficiaries to purchase any open positions. The cost is very small and the choices are numerous.

For a complete explanation of how the program works watch the SUMMARY VIDEO.

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