What is a better way to start New Year 2012 than with your pockets full of cash? The new Massachusetts Lottery raffle will be awarding one player the chance to wake up on New Year’s Day and cash in a total of $7 million. Talk about starting the New Year with the right foot!

The Massachusetts $10 Million Raffle will be just like any traditional raffle. Each $20 dollar ticket will contain a unique seven-digit number and will be sold in sequential order. The first ticket will have number 0000001 marked on it and the last ticket will have number 1000000 printed on it. A couple of things to note are that the player’s ticket number must exactly match one of the winning number sequences and players will not be able to pick the number of the ticket. National lottery

Sales for the Massachusetts $10 Million Raffle begin on Sunday, October 30th and will continue until Saturday, December 31st at 11:59 pm, that is taking into account that the complete set of one million tickets are not sold out before the scheduled time. The raffle drawing will take place on Sunday, January 1, 2012.

This raffle will keep a total of 1,022 winners happy. The top prize will consist of one winner for $7 million, followed by one winner for $1 million, twenty winners of $50,000 prizes and one thousand winners for a prize of $1000. All the prizes will one-time, lump-sum payments. Lottery numbers

Besides these generous prizes the lottery will also hold what they have named “Wild Raffle Wednesday”, every week as bonus drawings to reward players who pick up a raffle ticket early in the game’s sales period. Every Wednesday from November 2nd to December 28th, five lucky ticket numbers will be randomly drawn from the pool of tickets sold to-date for a $1,000 bonus prize. A total of forty-five $1,000 bonus prizes will be awarded and all of these tickets will remain eligible for the New Year’s Day drawing.

All of the drawings are selected by a computerized random number generator which is certified and used widely in other areas such as laboratory testing systems. The overall odds to will a cash prize in this Massachusetts $10 Million Raffle are 1:948.47. If you think about it, for $20 you are definitely getting a very good chance of winning one of these attractive cash prizes.