Illinois Instant Riches

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "Illinois Instant Riches" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (February 2014) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

Illinois Instant Riches (later known as Illinois' Luckiest) is a lottery game show airing in the state of Illinois, as well as nationally on Chicago-based Superstation WGN-TV. The show was hosted by Mark Goodman, with Linda Kollmeyer as his co-host and Bill Barber as announcer.

The show was produced by Mark Goodson Productions (later Jonathan Goodson Productions), and premiered on July 9, 1994.^[2] The show was renamed Illinois' Luckiest in 1998 and aired until 2000.

For contestants to appear on the show, they had to purchase an Illinois Instant Riches/Illinois' Luckiest scratch-off ticket from an Illinois Lottery retailer. Common for the lottery game shows of the 90s, if they uncovered three television set symbols on the ticket, the ticket was sent into a submission address, or redeemed physically at the nearest lottery office.

Players were randomly chosen from those tickets to be in the show's contestant pool, but only a certain number of them would be selected to play an on-stage game.

Several of the games on this show were transported to and from some other lottery game shows, most notably Flamingo Fortune (Florida), Bonus Bonanza (Massachusetts), and NY Wired (New York); the differences are mentioned in this article. Elements from these games also carried over to the quarterly-based Michigan Lottery game show Make Me Rich.