ROANOKE, Va. – Looking to buy a lottery ticket as a gift for someone? Wouldn’t it be nice to know where the best place is to buy a winning ticket?
10 News crunched the data and has an answer to that very question.
We reached out to the Virginia Lottery and received information about all 40,287 winning tickets, worth at least $600, claimed between Nov. 1, 2018, and Oct. 31, 2019, across Virginia.
The reason we chose $600 as the qualification for the data is that that’s the dollar amount that is the federal threshold to report gambling winnings when filing taxes.
Once we had the data, we dove into it to determine which stores sold the most winning tickets.
Here’s a look at the top 10 across Virginia.
Since you may not want to drive up to the K-1 Dairy Store in Arlington, here’s a breakdown of the 10 stores that sold the most winning tickets in Southwest and Central Virginia:
Wanting to look at the data in a more visual manner, we contacted our partners at Esri to take the massive amount of data we received from the Virginia Lottery and put it on a map.
In the map below, each store that sold a winning lottery ticket is a circle. The bigger the circle, the more tickets that store sold.
The color of each circle also has significance. The darker the color, the more lottery tickets were sold in that general area according to demographic data provided by Esri.
Click here if you can’t see the map.
Now you’ll have a little more than merely luck on your side the next time you buy a ticket!
If you think you or someone you know has a gambling problem, call The Virginia Problem Gambling Helpline at 1-888-532-3500 or visit the Virginia Lottery’s website.