A husband and wife from Linthicum who are casual Keno players but also buy Mega Millions and Powerball tickets when jackpots are high were the winners of one of 10 $100,000 prizes in the Maryland Lottery Holiday Raffle.
“I looked at the odds. There were only 325,000 tickets. This is our best chance at a million dollars,” the husband said Jan. 7 when the two claimed their prize at Lottery headquarters in Baltimore.
Over the span of the roughly eight weeks tickets were available, the husband purchased eight of the $20 raffle tickets, and ended up winning on the eighth one.
He had stashed the previous seven tickets in a secure location at home, but texted the numbers on them to himself to check after the drawing results were posted Jan. 2. On the first one, they won $50. Tickets two through seven were not winners. But then he checked the in-hand ticket from the Jan. 1 purchase and it came up a winner for $100,000.
“I checked it like 10 times!” he said. “Then I turned it over and signed it and waited until we got home.”
The $100,000 winning ticket was purchased at the Royal Farms store at 11073 Cathell Road in Berlin.
The Maryland Lottery Holiday Raffle ran Nov. 3 through Jan. 1, with winning numbers drawn on Jan. 2, including for a top prize of $1 million and 10 prizes of $100,000 each. The winning numbers – including 10,000 for prizes of $50 to $500 – were selected from among the 237,206 sequentially numbered tickets sold.
Tickets, numbered 000001 through 237206, were $20 each and were available at Maryland Lottery retailers across the state.
A list of all winning numbers is available on the Holiday Raffle page at mdlottery.com, and the page also has a search tool that can be used to check specific numbers to see if they are winners. Holiday Raffle tickets can also be checked by scanning them with the Maryland Lottery app, or at any Lottery retailer. Winners have 182 days from Jan. 2 to claim their prizes.
