A White Plains woman who has played the same six Bonus Match 5 numbers for 20 years finally cashed in in a big way, buying three tickets with those numbers for the Sept. 4 drawing and winning the $50,000 top prize on all three — a combined $150,000.
“First I had to call my sister to read the numbers,” the winner said Sept. 8 as she claimed the prize at Maryland Lottery headquarters in Baltimore, her husband at her side. She turned to her sister rather than her husband because, as she put it, “I had to talk to someone who gambles” — her husband doesn’t play the lottery. “I was the last one to know!” he said. The winner said her reaction wasn’t especially animated when she first realized she’d won, in part because it was around 11 p.m.; she tried to go to sleep afterward, but the excitement got in the way. The couple, both retired federal employees, said they plan to use the winnings on a few projects around the house.
Bonus Match 5’s top prize odds are roughly 1 in 575,757 for a single $1 ticket, so winning it three times over would ordinarily be extraordinary — though in this case, all three tickets used the same fixed numbers for the same single drawing rather than three independent number combinations, meaning the win reflects one matching set of numbers coming up, tripled by ticket count rather than by chance three separate times.
The tickets were purchased at White Plains Wine & Spirits, 4425 Crain Highway in White Plains, which will collect $1,500 in retailer bonuses for selling the winning tickets. It’s the second time in about three weeks the Charles County store has sold a trio of $50,000 Bonus Match 5 winners: three separate top-prize tickets sold there for the Aug. 17 drawing remained unclaimed as of the Lottery’s most recent public tally, meaning the store has now sold six $50,000 top-prize Bonus Match 5 tickets combined since mid-August.
