Lotto Fever! : Ticket Sales for Record $40-Million Jackpot Shatter All Marks

Millions of California Lotto 6/49 players braved long lines and odds of 1 in 14 million Friday for a chance at a record jackpot approaching $40 million.

The frenzy has shattered all previous Lotto sales records, lottery spokesman John Schade said. Ticket sale hours were extended from 10 p.m. to 11 p.m. Friday at the state’s 6,860 computer terminals to meet the demand.

“We will exceed $30 million in sales for the draw. There’s no question about it,” Schade said.

Brisk sales for Friday reached $3.8 million by 11 a.m., compared to just $641,000 during the same period last week when the jackpot was hovering around $16 million, Schade said. Even bigger sales were projected for today.

The jackpot eclipses the previous California record of $25.4 million, shared Oct. 26, 1987, by retired car salesman Wayne Fast of Carmichael and Long Beach longshoreman Richard Ross. The richest lottery drawing ever in North America, $46 million, was claimed by two people on Oct. 14, 1987, in the Pennsylvania Super 7 lottery.

Added to Total

No one correctly picked all six Lotto 6/49 numbers for Wednesday’s midweek drawing, so the $26.1-million prize was automatically added to tonight’s jackpot.

Lottery players vying for the instant fortune often encountered long lines as they waited for a store clerk to enter their lucky numbers into the Lotto 6/49 computer.

“It’s going real crazy,” said a harried David Turnquist, manager of the 7-Eleven market in Truckee, near the California-Nevada border. “I don’t know what the sales are today, but we’ve had a big line most of the day.”

About 95% of the sales were to Nevada residents hoping to strike it rich in California, Turnquist said.

“I seldom play this, but because of the jackpot, I was eager to get it,” said Ernie Basa as he waited in a long lunchtime line at a downtown Sacramento card shop. “Sometimes I believe in luck.”

At the Ping Yuen Drug Store in San Francisco’s Chinatown, currently the top Lotto outlet in California, lines stretched out the door and down the street all day Thursday and Friday.

Before Wednesday’s anti-climatic drawing, the store averaged 40 to 50 people in line at all hours of the day. That had doubled Friday as the store’s machine cranked out tickets continually.

Kam Wong, who bills his Ping Yuen store as “lucky” in neighborhood ads, was asked by a Lotto player how much the store would get if the winning ticket were bought there.

“I get one-half of 1%--$200,000,” Wong said.

Team Formed

To prepare for the last-minute crush of ticket sales, state lottery officials put together a Lottery fever management team made up of phone company and lottery computer terminal experts. In addition, lottery employees were dispatched to all 100 of the experimental self-service ticket dispensers in Northern California to assist would-be players.

A psychologist, meanwhile, predicted that millions of Californians are going to suffer what he called “lottery fantasy syndrome” when their numbers do not come up.

“Many Californians who have been living in fantasyland dreaming about how they will spend all their millions when they win the lottery will crash hard on Saturday night and may experience lottery fantasy syndrome, a form of psychological depression that occurs when the truth of reality destroys the dreams of fantasy,” Robert Butterworth said Thursday.

Butterworth said the fantasy heats up when the jackpot goes over $20 million.

“Then the winner is picked, and all these people who have been in fantasyland for the last few days, thinking about how all this money may help create a new life, crash and are then faced with the same old reality as before. Depression and apathy can then set in.”

The Lotto outlets close just before the game’s draw at 7:58 p.m. today.