By John Lyon
Arkansas News Bureau

LITTLE ROCK — The reaction to Arkansas Lottery Director Ernie Passailaigue’s statement that the lottery might include “monitor games” such as keno took Passailaigue by surprise.

“For the life of me, I can’t figure it out,” Passailaigue said Thursday. “But it’s important out here, so I guess we need to address it.”

Among those who have objected to monitor games are Jerry Cox, executive director of the conservative Family Council, who said last week that monitor games sound like slot machines and said the state appears to be “well on the way to state-run casinos.”

Gov. Mike Beebe also weighed in on the topic, telling reporters, “I think the lottery should be consistent with what the people thought they were voting on, and I don’t remember any discussion about keno.”

Objections like those are familiar to Marie Kilbane, spokeswoman for the Ohio Lottery. Ohio has had a lottery since 1974, but it introduced keno, its first and only monitor game, last August.

“It was mischaracterized for a while. People do not play a machine,” as critics claimed, she said.

A keno player in Ohio can wager $1, $2, $3, $4, $5, $10 or $20. The player picks up to 10 numbers out of a pool of 80, then sees how many of the numbers match with 20 numbers drawn by the Ohio Lottery.

Drawings occur every four minutes from 11:04 a.m. to 1:44 a.m., seven days a week.

Players can check a monitor to see if they won, but they can also contact the lottery directly to find out if they made a lucky pick.

“We keep track of the numbers,” Kilbane said.

Keno is played in about 1,000 locations in Ohio. It is restricted to establishments that serve alcohol on premises, to help ensure that only adults play.

Ohio has 8,800 retailers selling lottery tickets, including the 1,000 who offer keno. Ticket sales for the 2008-09 fiscal year totaled $2.4 billion, of which about $95 million was generated by keno.

Though it’s not the top-selling lottery game in Ohio, “it’s still been helpful,” Kilbane said. “It’s kept us from being in the middle ground or having sales be flat or less than last year.”

Ohio’s lottery proceeds were up 3 percent or 4 percent in the past fiscal year compared to the previous year, before keno was offered, she said.

Passailaigue said that compared to Powerball — a multi-state lottery game with jackpots starting at $20 million — monitor games are of minor significance.

“In the scheme of things … it’s a 1 out of 100,” while Powerball is “a 99 out of 100,” he said.

That’s true throughout the industry, according to Chuck Strutt, executive director of the Multi-State Lottery Association.

“Monitor games are not much used in the industry,” Strutt said. The handful of states that offer the games do so to spice up what is really just a matter of picking numbers, he said.

“It’s the opportunity to make that a little more fun, when it tells you if you’ve won or not,” he said.

After being around for nearly a year, keno has not transformed any Ohio establishments into casinos, according to Kilbane. For one thing, each retailer has only one keno monitor, not row upon row of them.

“It’s just one small part of their overall offerings,” she said.

Kilbane said criticism of Keno in Ohio has been “quieter” since the games started and people saw how they worked.

The criticism has not entirely stopped, though. David Zanotti, president of the American Policy Roundtable in Strongsville, Ohio, said last week in an interview with The Daily Record newspaper in Wooster, Ohio, that the state is on a troubling path.

The state’s lawmakers are considering a bill to legalize slot machines at racetracks.

“We’ve gone from a single drawing to a multi-state drawing to keno and now we’re at racinos,” Zanotti told the newspaper. “So how long until full-fledged casinos?”