With just one week left before the holiday raffle drawing, the lottery has sold only about half its tickets. The fewer tickets sold, the better the odds of winning for those who plunked down $20 for a raffle number.

Lottery officials were pleased by strong early sales for the raffle, in which players buy from a limited pool of tickets for cash prizes. The sales, combined with trends in other games, were a sign that things were turning around for the lottery. It has struggled to keep ticket sales up to projections.

But with one week before the Dec. 27 drawing, raffle sales haven't even reached the break-even point of about 290,000 tickets. Raffles tend to sell a lot of tickets when they first go on sale and then right before the drawing, lottery director Tom Shaheen said. It's true, he said, that the raffle is lagging behind the state's first raffle, which was held in summer. That game saw a huge spike in sales as the July drawing neared. But in the summer, about 100,000 tickets remained in the last week, not the more than 200,000 still available for the holiday raffle.

"I'm not real concerned at this point," Shaheen said. "We're running a little behind the first raffle. It's not uncommon."

Odell Graham owns the Ready Mart, a convenience store in Asheboro. In the last raffle, his store sold the most tickets in Randolph County, he said. About 30 percent of those tickets were purchased in the last six days of the sale.

"I think, push comes to shove, toward the end of next week, you'll see sales pick up," Graham said.

Other stores aren't as hopeful. Mohammed Abdou works at the Buy Quick on Worth Street in Durham. He said that few of the store's customers spend $20 on a raffle ticket. They are more inclined to go for a cheaper scratch-off ticket.

"There's a lot of people who can't really afford it," Abdou said.

But Shaheen said sales have already started to pick up. More tickets have been sold per day this week than just a week ago, he said. Officials expect interest in the raffle to get more intense. The first raffle sold out a few days before the drawing. After that, people tried to buy tickets nearly 20,000 times, Shaheen said.

Regardless of how many tickets are sold, Shaheen said the drawing will take place Dec. 27.