Venado, a longtime Maryland Lottery player from Silver Spring, recently made the switch from Mega Millions and Powerball to the Maryland-only jackpot game Muti-Match and, shortly thereafter, won a $770,000 jackpot.
A Multi-Match ticket worth an annuity value of $770,000 sat in the winner’s car from Nov. 5 when it was purchased for more than a week until the winner, a grandfather from Silver Spring, checked it on Nov. 13.
That’s when the family excitement began.
First the winner took the ticket back to the store where he bought it, Bel Pre Wine at 2251 Bel Pre Road in Silver Spring, and asked the clerk to check it.
“She said, ‘Shhhhhh. Don’t tell anyone,’” he said Nov. 14 when he claimed the prize at Lottery headquarters. He went directly home and called his son to say he had won a lot of money. Unconvinced and wary of scams and swindlers, the son, who was at work, called his wife and asked her to go to the winner’s house and figure out what was going on.
The daughter-in-law arrived to find the winner with a Multi-Match ticket in his hand, but she was unsure of exactly how to confirm whether it was a winner, she said as she accompanied her in-laws to the Lottery Winner’s Circle room, with the winner’s son standing by on the phone.
The daughter-in-law’s first step was to check the Maryland Lottery website’s news feed, where she found a story about a winning ticket having been sold a week earlier at the Silver Spring store. She was struck because the story said the player might not have known about having won and, indeed, her father-in-law had been unaware.
The post on the Lottery website included the winning numbers, so she checked them against the 15 lines of numbers on the $10 ticket and, sure enough, one of them matched all six numbers on a single line.
They made an appointment straight away and were at Lottery headquarters the next day.
The winner, who is using the alias “Venado” to tell his story, is a Maryland Lottery regular, having played Mega Millions and Powerball for years, but he’s a newcomer to Multi-Match. Two weeks prior to buying the winning ticket, he and his wife were visiting family friends who suggested playing Multi-Match because the probability of hitting the jackpot on the Maryland only game are substantially better (though still long) than the multi-state jackpot games.
He made the switch and, against odds of 1 in 2,032,151.7 on a single game, ended up with the top prize.
He says his grandchildren will be substantial beneficiaries of his good fortune.
Bel Pre Wine, having sold the ticket, receives a bonus of $1,000. This is the sixth Multi-Match jackpot-winning ticket sold in 2025.
