Most lottery & gaming consultants understand the business.
Few understand the math.
Rarely do you find both.
Rhea Jankowski built the draws forecasting model now used across every Canadian lottery and optimized a $2.3 billion draws portfolio. That's the experience Ask RJ Consulting brings to lottery & gaming operators navigating complex, high-stakes decisions.
Draw Games Forecasting
Most lottery forecasts treat jackpots as predictable. They aren't.
"We did everything right. How did we miss by this much?"
Rolling jackpot games can miss budget by nine figures even when everything you control goes right. That's not a forecasting failure. It's what happens when a single-number forecast meets an inherently random variable. Whether the jackpot rolls or gets won is pure chance, and most forecasting approaches were never built to account for that.
"How do I explain this to the board without sounding incompetent?"
Without the right framework, even a perfectly reasonable explanation sounds like an excuse. The problem isn't the miss. It's not having the language or the model to show exactly what caused it and why it was outside your control.
"We just had a record year. How do I tell them next year's budget is lower?"
After a year of unusually high jackpots and record sales, stakeholders want to treat last year as the new baseline. Explaining why that's not how rolling jackpot games work is its own skill — and it requires tools most operators don't currently have.
The solution:
The probability-based forecasting methodology Rhea developed at Ontario Lottery & Gaming reframes the problem entirely. Instead of a single number, it produces a range of outcomes based on what the business can and can't control — giving operators the tools to choose their risk tolerance, set a defensible budget, and explain variances with confidence.
The methodology was validated by a University of Waterloo mathematics professor and adopted across every Canadian lottery organization. It has been applied to the full national draw portfolio, including Lotto Max and Lotto 6/49. The same approach applies directly to Mega Millions, Powerball, and any rolling jackpot game in your portfolio.
Rhea has trained lottery product teams, finance teams, and senior leadership on this methodology. She has been brought back repeatedly to do it.
Portfolio Optimization
Finding margin without losing players.
"Sales are down but I can't tell if it's the game or just bad luck."
Separating a business problem from a luck-of-the-draw problem is harder than it sounds. Getting it wrong means pulling levers that don't need pulling. Or worse, leaving the real issue unaddressed while the game continues to underperform.
"The brand is strong. The bones are good. So why isn't it performing like it used to?"
Some games have everything going for them on paper and still lose momentum. Understanding why requires someone who can look at game structure, player behaviour, portfolio dynamics, and market conditions together — not in isolation.
"I need to find margin but I can't afford to damage the player experience to get there."
Margin optimization in lottery isn't just a finance exercise. Changes to prize structures, jackpot mechanics, and game conditions all have player experience consequences that ripple through sales. The math needs to account for the consumer.
"Do I have too many games, or not enough of the right ones?"
Portfolio decisions are some of the hardest in lottery because every game affects every other game. A new launch can energize the portfolio or quietly cannibalize it. Most operators manage games individually. The ones who win manage them as a system.
Selected Work:
Lotto Max jackpot cap increase (2016): Structural modelling that reinvigorated the business and drove a record year.
Lotto Max 2.0 (2019): Prize structure and forecasting work behind OLG's first billion-dollar lottery brand.
Lightning Lotto (2020): Prize structure design for a successful launch still in market today, since adopted by other lotteries.
iLottery Strategy
Digital lottery isn't retail lottery with a website.
"I know online is an opportunity. I just don't have the team to get there."
Most lottery organizations built their expertise around retail. Their staff, their processes, and their instincts are retail. When it comes time to launch or grow an iLottery business, the skills that made them successful don't automatically transfer.
"I can hire digital people or lottery people. Finding someone who understands both is the hard part."
Most digital consultants have never sold a lottery ticket. Most lottery operators don't have deep digital experience on staff. What you need is someone who has done both, who understands how digital lottery players behave differently from retail players, how to think about channel mix and incrementality, and how to build a digital business without losing sight of the retail foundation that still drives the majority of revenue.
Rhea led lottery across both retail and digital channels at OLG, including the relaunch of olg.ca and the introduction of draw games to OLG's digital platform, delivering record digital sales.
You can build a great product and still get the market wrong.
Expanding into a new iGaming market requires more than a strong technology stack and a marketing budget. It requires understanding how players in that market actually behave, what the competitive landscape really looks like, and where operators from outside consistently misread the room.
The Canadian market is a particular specialty. Ontario and Alberta represent significant opportunity, and both have regulatory frameworks that operators consistently underestimate. Rhea has navigated both sides of that equation, launching digital sports betting at OLG and leading Canadian market strategy at Caesars Digital.
She works with operators at the earliest stages of market entry: competitive assessment, regulatory landscape, go-to-market strategy, and the localization decisions that determine whether a product feels native or foreign to the players you're trying to win.
iGaming: Canadian Market Entry & Localization
About Rhea Jankowski
Rhea Jankowski has run the business and built the models.
Not many people can say both.
After nearly a decade at Ontario Lottery and Gaming, including as Director of the $2.3 billion Draws portfolio, Rhea built a practice around the problems that sit at the intersection of business strategy and quantitative modelling. The kind of problems that are too commercially complex for a pure mathematician and too mathematically complex for a pure marketer.
Her forecasting methodology, built during her first year at OLG and validated by a University of Waterloo mathematics professor, was adopted across every Canadian lottery organization and remains the national standard for rolling jackpot forecasting in Canada.
Before founding Ask RJ Consulting, she served as VP, International Sports Betting and Casino at Caesars Digital. This followed her work launching digital sports betting at OLG before the Ontario market opened to private operators.
She founded Ask RJ Consulting to bring that same rigour to lottery operators, gaming companies, and new market entrants who need more than instinct to make high-stakes decisions.
Let’s Talk
Whether you're navigating a forecasting challenge, rethinking your portfolio, or exploring a new market, I'd love to hear what you're working on.