A little persuasion from her boyfriend convinced a woman from Upper Marlboro to buy a $50 $5,000,000 LUXE ticket. A few days later she scratched it and discovered she won $200,000.
“I guess I’ll give him $5 or $10 since it was his idea,” the winner joked April 30 after claiming the prize at Lottery headquarters in Baltimore.
She said she and her boyfriend were at Crain Convenience & Tobacco at 1340 Crain Highway in Bowie when she decided to buy a Lottery ticket, and her boyfriend suggested the $5,000,000 LUXE scratch-off.
“I took it home and set aside for a time,” the financial specialist said. Her boyfriend asked her a few days later if she had scratched it and she recalls telling him, “I’ll let it marinate awhile.”
The $5,000,000 LUXE ticket has 10 rows of five numbers for a total of 50 chances to win. When the player scratched her ticket, she had a single match on the last number in the last row with the prize amount $200,000 under it.
She immediately called her boyfriend, but he didn’t pick up. True to her profession, she immediately checked on the implications of her win and then made arrangements to claim her prize.
The winner says she’ll be paying some bills and then she’s going to “load up my IRA.”
Her usual Lottery gameplan is to buy lower priced tickets, both for herself and as gifts for family and friends.
“It’s fun to see when they win!” she said. Going forward, though, she says she’s going to add the $50 tickets to her repertoire, probably on a once-a-month basis.
Her win is the first of 10 $200,000 prizes on the $5,000,000 LUXE ticket, which has been in stores since Feb. 6. In addition, all of the ticket’s three $5 million top prizes remain unclaimed.
