PlayNow lotto: draw nights, cut-offs and winning numbers

PlayNow sells BCLC’s whole lottery range online: Lotto Max, Lotto 6/49, BC/49, Daily Grand, BC 50/50, Scratch & Win, Pull Tabs, Pacific Hold’Em Poker and Keno. For PlayNow lotto draw games, two times matter. Online sales stop at 8:21 p.m. Pacific on draw nights and reopen at 8:31, and winning numbers go up on PlayNow and bclc.com from about 9:00 p.m. Tickets bought on PlayNow are checked for you, and you’ll get an email if one wins.

PlayNow lotto draw calendar

Game	Draw nights	Price and prize
Lotto Max	Tuesday, Friday	$6 a play buys four sets of seven numbers; jackpot odds about 1 in 33 million
Lotto 6/49	Wednesday, Saturday	Classic jackpot plus the Gold Ball draw, which pays a guaranteed $1 million or a growing Gold Ball jackpot; 1 in 13,983,816 per line for the classic jackpot
BC/49	Wednesday, Saturday, 8:30 p.m. PT	$1 a play; fixed $2 million top prize
Daily Grand	Monday, Thursday	$3 a play; $1,000 a day for life, or $7 million as a lump sum
Extra	Alongside the games above	$1 add-on, top prize $500,000

BC/49 is sold only in B.C., and its top prize doesn’t roll over. BCLC explains why: average sales per draw are under $2 million, and a B.C.-only game can’t fund a jackpot that keeps growing.

Checking PlayNow winning numbers

Under Lottery, the Check Results page lists the latest numbers for every game, and bclc.com shows the same. If the two ever disagree with BCLC’s official winning numbers report, the report wins; that disclaimer sits under every results table.

For tickets bought on PlayNow you don’t need to check at all. Prizes land in your account balance the day after the draw. Paper tickets from a store are another matter: scan them with the BCLC Lotto! app or have a retailer check them.

The national games (Lotto Max, Lotto 6/49, Daily Grand) are drawn in Toronto by the Interprovincial Lottery Corporation with a random number generator. BC/49, Extra and Keno are drawn by BCLC at its head office in Kamloops.

Lottery subscriptions

A subscription buys future draws for you. Pick 2, 10, 52 or 104 draws, or choose “Never Miss a Draw” and it runs until you stop it. Some rules are worth knowing before you set one up.

With Quick Pick, the numbers on your first ticket repeat for every draw; they aren’t regenerated. Extra numbers, oddly, are new each time. Tickets are bought around 8:00 a.m. PT on the morning after the previous draw, and if your balance is short the subscription goes on hold; stay on hold through a whole draw and it stops. The automatic purchase doesn’t run on Mondays, so for Monday’s Daily Grand your account needs funds by 8:00 a.m. Sunday. Stopping or replaying a subscription is done from the My Subscriptions page.

Things PlayNow won’t let you do

Cancel an online ticket, for one; once bought, it’s final. You also can’t pick all four sets of Lotto Max numbers. You choose one and the rest are generated, which BCLC justifies with research showing most players only want to pick one set. And you can’t buy at all while you’re outside B.C.

PlayNow and the Lotto! app after the update

Today the BCLC Lotto! app and PlayNow share an account and a balance. BCLC says that after its platform relaunch the Lotto! app keeps ticket buying and the scanner but gets a wallet of its own, and subscriptions move entirely to PlayNow and the new combined PlayNow app. Your existing balance and subscriptions stay on the PlayNow side. If you mostly buy through the Lotto! app, expect to top up two wallets.

Our partner link leads to a third-party operator, not to BCLC: see today’s offer.

Sources: PlayNow’s help centre (lottery sections) and the BC/49 game page.