Claims $50,000 top prize playing $50,000 Cash game
His job requires intense focus and attention to detail, a Montgomery County man told Lottery officials this week. Luckily for him, however, these skills failed him when he was buying a scratch-off a few weeks back. The resulting mistake added $50,000 to his family’s bank account.
The Silver Spring resident works in construction. “We have to be precise building bridges and overpasses,” he explained. It is surprising, then, that while on his lunch break in mid-May at Metro Coffee Convenience in Rockville, he made the simplest of errors.
“It was a Friday, I get a ticket every weekend,” he said. “When I figured out which scratch game to play, I pressed that ticket on the screen, but it was the wrong one. I pressed the one next to it, the wrong ticket.”
Moments later, that “wrong” instant ticket – the $20 $50,000 Cash game – would become his best purchase ever. Chastising himself for his carelessness, the player returned to his car to scratch off his instant game. “When I saw the prize, I couldn’t believe it. ‘This can’t be true,’ I thought.”
The $50,000 Cash scratch-off went on sale in late December. The instant ticket is unusual in the 160 top prizes it had to offer when it debuted. This latest $50,000 winner, purchased from Metro Coffee Convenience at 202 Park Road in Rockville, leaves 107 top prizes available. In addition, 118 second-tier prizes worth $5,000 also remain unclaimed. For selling this top-prize winning instant ticket, the Montgomery County business will receive a $500 bonus from the Lottery.
The lucky construction worker and his wife plan to purchase property sometime next year and, he noted, this $50,000 addition to the cash they’ve been saving will help a great deal. “Now that I know about all of these top prizes,” he joked, “$50,000 Cash might just become my every weekend Lottery game. Maybe I’ll be back (to the Lottery Winner’s Circle).”
