Lotto Alaska: ‘We Do A Better Job’ Allocating Revenue Than The Government Would

A bill that would establish a state-run lottery in Alaska failed to pass during the most recent legislative session. It’s yet to be determined if lawmakers will renew that effort in the next session, which begins in late-January 2025.

But it is clear there will be at least one group lobbying against any such bill: Lotto Alaska.

An independent lottery platform that operates via a charitable gaming license and sends its money to nonprofits throughout the state, Lotto Alaska has blossomed into a legitimate statewide operation since its inception in 2017 and, for all intents and purposes, serves the same audience that a state-run lottery would.

Stosh Solski, a marketing manager at Lotto Alaska, told Lottery Geeks the organization has lobbied against previous legislative efforts to pass state lottery bills.

Solski said Lotto Alaska doesn’t trust what that government will do with lottery revenue.

“If we get a state-run lottery, the state’s going to take the money and they’re going to spend it however they feel good,” Solski told Lottery Geeks, “whereas we run and we raise money for the local nonprofits that need the funding. We’ve run for a breast cancer detection center. We’ve run for food banks all the way down to little places like Straw for Dogs, that build dog houses for dogs that have to stay outside.

“We feel that we do a better job of getting it out to people than [the government] would.”

Solski said Lotto Alaska usually does its lottery runs for anywhere from one to three different nonprofit organizations each week.

Recent bill didn’t even pass through committee

Legislative attempts to enact an Alaskan state lottery date all the way back to 2003, when two bills both failed. Most recently, Sen. James Kaufman and Sen. Kelly Merrick filed Senate Bill 150 in May 2023. It was assigned to a committee but never discussed, and it died in committee when the session ended in May 2024.

SB 150 would have created a state lottery and allowed Alaskans to play in multi-jurisdictional lottery draw games like Powerball and Mega Millions. Scratch-off games are currently illegal and SB 150 wouldn’t have changed that. 

Regarding what the revenue would fund, the bill only mentioned that lottery revenue would go to the general fund.

Lottery Geeks reached out to Kaufman and Merrick twice for comment, but neither responded.

Alaska is one of five states that don’t have a state-run lottery, along with Hawaii, Utah, Alabama, and Nevada.

Lotto Alaska seeing exponential growth

Lotto Alaska began as a miniscule game with 105 players, a $330 weekly cash prize, and a $2,000 jackpot minimum for its first drawing back in January 2017. Today, that weekly cash prize is more than $300,000 and the jackpot minimum is $100,000.

Solski said Lotto Alaska has awarded $40 million in winnings since 2017 — a recent winner took home more than $13 million — and it’s paid more than $8 million to Alaska nonprofits.

A 2014 legislative response letter on the topic of a potential Alaska Lottery suggested a state-run lottery could bring $8 million in revenue each year to state coffers.

Solski said that number sounds about right. He expects Lotto Alaska’s nonprofit payouts to quickly approach that $8 million figure as the years go on.

The growth of Lotto Alaska, he said, has been exponential.

“Our history is really skewed to the present time, because since we started in 2017, we’ve given away about $8 million to our nonprofit partners — $4 million of it was during this year,” Solski said. “It’s growing very, very rapidly. It was really slow that first four or five years. And when COVID hit, they changed the rules for what we could sell to stores. We could sell online because they didn’t want anybody going out. And they made that permanent now, and the online sales were what really made us statewide.” 

‘We cover the entire state’

And Lotto Alaska is definitely statewide, Solski said.

They’ve had winners in Ketchikan — close to the southernmost tip of Alaska, way down by Vancouver — and Sarichef Island — out on the northwest of Alaska, by the Bering Strait. They’ve had winners in Utqiagvik, formerly known as Barrow, that sits on the northernmost point of Alaska, just about parallel with the northernmost point of Sweden.

Recently, there was a winner on Shemya Island, an island so far west off the coast of Alaska that it’s actually just 280 miles from Russia — and 1,200 miles from Anchorage.

Other independent lottery operations have sprung up in the wake of Lotto Alaska’s popularity. But, as of now, Lotto Alaska has a stranglehold on the market.

“We cover the entire state,” Solski said. “We go from Barrow to every corner.”

Lotto Alaska’s library of games

Lotto Alaska currently offers its one main weekly draw game, Chase the Ace. But there’s also a midweek drawing of $2,000 for everyone that has bought Chase the Ace tickets so far. And there’s also the Match 6 side game, plus the big weekly drawing for prizes of more than $300,000 — and of course the jackpot, if somebody wins it.

And, again, all these tickets can be bought in-person or online — making Lotto Alaska more digital-friendly than most of the state-run lotteries in the US.

Of each Lotto Alaska ticket sold:

• 20% goes to the weekly prize pot
• 30% goes to the current jackpot
• 50% goes to Alaska nonprofit organizations and to “help to cover Lotto Alaska operation expenses,” per its website

Lotto Alaska also has a sister company, Emerald Isle, that sells pull-tabs in a handful of locations throughout the state.

In terms of future offerings, Solski said they’re “always looking for the next new idea, and we’re always trying to add different price levels as we grow.”