LITTLE CURRENT—Little Current Lions Club Catch the Ace tickets are in hot demand these days with vendors, including this very office, selling out within minutes each Thursday morning but enthusiasts of the popular progressive lottery, or those who wish they were, can rejoice in learning that with four weeks left to go before the jackpot must be won, an additional 4,000 tickets are now on offer.
Lion President Bruce Burnett learned last week of a new rule in the Catch the Ace rulebook that states the organizer may sell all unused tickets. While the progressive lottery may be selling out in record time now, the first few weeks saw hundreds of tickets out of the 1,000 up for grabs left on the table. In fact, all added up, those unsold tickets numbered 4,000 and so it is those 4,000 that will now be available (an additional 1,000 each week for the next four weeks).
“Our licence allows the maximum sale of 1,000 tickets over the duration of 20 weeks,” explained Catch the Ace committee member Lion Lori Draper, explaining how the $50,000 prize board is divided.
“The prize board consists of a weekly draw prize (20 percent of the current week’s ticket sales),” Lion Lori noted. “Based on 1,000 tickets sold over the period of 20 weeks, this totals $20,000.”
“In addition, the jackpot is cumulative, meaning 30 percent of weekly ticket sales is added progressively to the jackpot,” Lion Lori continued. “Over the duration of 20 weeks, based on 1,000 tickets sold weekly, this would in fact be $30,000. When you total these two sets of numbers, the prize board potentially would be a total of $50,000 as the weekly draw prizes are not to exceed $20,000 and the progressive jackpot is not to exceed $30,000.”
“However,” she continued, “in the first 11 weeks we were unable to sell the full 1,000 tickets, therefore the jackpot could never reach the full potential of $30,000. It was our understanding that we were unable to carry over the unsold tickets from the earlier draws, which were therefore considered void.”
Since the club has discovered they are in fact able to carry over the amount of unsold tickets from the earlier draws, they will be dividing the 4,000 unsold tickets into the remaining four weekly draws.
Monday morning saw the first of the additional 1,000 tickets go on sale at The Expositor office with a lineup stretching out the door at 9 am sharp.
As of last week, the progressive jackpot has reached almost $18,000 and it’s this figure, with those kind of odds (only 2,000 tickets each week), that has everyone so excited.
A reminder that only four tickets per person can be purchased in order to spread the Catch the Ace love.
Once the ace of spades is ‘caught’ from one of the numbered envelopes, these additional tickets will not be moved forward to the new draw.
A reminder that the draw can be viewed on Facebook Live each week on the Little Current Lions Club’s Facebook page on Wednesday nights at 8 pm. You do not have to be present to win. See Page 11 of this newspaper each week for a complete list of the sellers of Catch the Ace tickets.
