Welcome, Suckers, To Improved Lottery!

STANDING in line there amid the schlock magazines, the chili dogs, the movie rentals, and other trappings of a typically tawdry 7-Eleven store, I was feeling a little sheepish.

After all, I was the guy who for years had been responsible for The Times' editorial campaign against state lotteries in general and the Washington state games in particular. (Considering the lotteries' popularity, it has been a spectacularly unsuccessful crusade. Our editorial impact has been absolutely zippo.)

Yet there I was in mid-1988, waiting to buy my very first Lotto ticket. How come? Like lots of others, I'd finally succumbed because of the size of the jackpot: a phenomenal $12 million, not equaled in this state before or since. At one point, sales at outlets across the state were occurring at a rate of $4,000 a minute.

When I got to work the next day, I told the office gang it was going to be embarrassing when I won the $12 million because of our anti-lottery editorials. But what the hell, I said. I can handle it.

Memories of that one and only losing Lotto experience came back this week with the report from Olympia that the lottery staff was yearning for the good old days when a Lotto kitty of, say, a million bucks or two would really bring out the sucker bets.

Sales have been slumping in recent months, officials say, because Lotto prizes have been running in the range of ``only'' $1 million (the minimum in any Lotto game) to $4 million.

``The sales are decreasing,'' Evelyn Sun, lottery director, told The Associated Press, ``because people, I think, are getting bored with the jackpots.''

How to rejuvenate the enthusiasm of bored bettors? Plainly, offer bigger prizes. The bigger the pot, the theory goes, the more tickets sold. The jackpot is what really drives Lotto, says Sun.

One way to up the ante would be to charge higher ticket prices, unchanged since Lotto's beginnings. But nobody in Olympia is thinking in those terms. Instead - are you ready for this? - there's a plan to lengthen the odds against winning.

In the arcane arena of lottery economics, it's believed that making it harder to win will increase sales revenues by an estimated 9 percent in the first year. The idea is that with fewer winners but bigger jackpots - in the neighborhood, say, of $3 million to $7 million each - sales will perk up again. They've dipped so low in the past few months that the lottery's reserves had to be tapped to pay off winners.

The pattern is not new. When the drawings first began several years ago, the odds were about 1 in 1.9 million. As sales declined, the odds of winning were changed less than three years later to 1 in 3.5 million.

Now, if the Lottery Commission approves a staff recommendation during a meeting in Spokane next Friday, the odds will change in October to a ridiculous 1 in 7 million. The Lotto odds would be lengthened by changing the game so that bettors would pick 6 numbers from a field of 49, instead of the present 44.

No wonder critics call the government numbers games ``looteries.'' But Sun probably is right when she says that if most players cared about the odds, they wouldn't play.

Whatever the motives of Lotto's patrons in this state, they've paid handsomely for the privilege of getting into the game. So far, they've parted with some $810 million, nearly 40 percent of which has gone into the state's general fund.

While not a big item in the context of state budgets sized in the billions of dollars, this sum is significant in personal terms and - more important - is a heavy price to pay for the damage done to the credibility of state government.

There's something terribly tacky about a government that subscribes as a matter of public policy to the proposition that it's possible to get something for nothing.

Even so, lottery states not only are increasing (to more than 30 at last count, plus the District of Columbia) but are joining in combinations across state borders. Officials of Lotto America, now played in Oregon and eight other states, are talking of an offshore tie-up with lotteries in Argentina, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands.

And a lot of lawmakers aren't kidding these days when they talk of a federal lottery as a way to help pare the deficit.

A federal lottery and bigger multistate games would be tougher rivalry for Washington state.

But in the world of legalized gambling, the competition is always getting tougher. Spending on the various games sponsored by this state's lottery has diminished the play in many bingo parlors around Washington and has helped slow the growth of parimutuel-betting revenues at Longacres.

The latter is one factor mentioned in the continuing rumors that Longacres will be sold and put to other uses.

Meantime, the lottery people will keep looking for ever more hype and still bigger pots to lure new suckers to the convenience-store counters.

After all, they got me with a $12 million jackpot a couple of years ago. And even people who should know better show up in the publicity about state lotteries.

Just the other day, for example, there was a news item about the son of ``Big Tuna'' Accardo, said to be a gambling czar in Chicago. Anthony Ross Accardo, the story said, won half of a $5.9 million jackpot on a $1 bet in the Illinois state lottery.

Herb Robinson's column appears Monday and Friday on The Times' editorial page.