Advertisement

Chase the Ace lottery madness nearing final draw

Chase the Ace in Inverness: 6 things to know

The jackpot fever that has gripped a small Canadian town for nearly a year is about to come to end.

More than 20,000 Chase the Ace hopefuls descended on Inverness, N.S., on Saturday, where ticket holders had a one in six chance of walking away with the $1.2-million prize – but no one did.

Legion Branch 132 wasn’t prepared for such a frenzy over its Chase the Ace fundraiser, which is similar to a 50/50 draw except that each week’s winner gets 20 per cent of the pot and a chance to pull the ace of spades out of a deck of playing cards for the other 30 per cent. If the ace isn’t drawn, the 30 per cent goes back into the pot, which has now been building for 47 weeks.

The legion sold $1.1 million worth of tickets — at $5 for three or $20 for a book — in just five hours before Saturday’s draw, the legion’s head bartender, Michael Fraser, told Yahoo Canada News.

“There’s people buying three, four, five thousand dollars’ worth,” he said in a phone interview on Monday. “Some have two pages of names they’re buying for.”

Tickets will be on sale again this Saturday, and Fraser estimates the jackpot will rise to between $1.5 and $1.6 million.

If Canadians from “away” are thinking they might want to get in on this, there is a catch: Tickets have to be purchased in person in Inverness, located on Cape Breton Island, and players must be present at the draw.

That’s why the town ended up live-streaming Saturday’s draw for all the would-be winners, who filled three separate venues: the legion hall, the hockey arena and the Broad Cove Concert Grounds.

Carol Hartling of New Glasgow, N.S., won over $230,000 but didn’t find the ace.

The town of about 1,500 has been overwhelmed, and officials are concerned about public safety.

“We have nowhere to put people anymore,” Fraser said. “I don’t know what the town’s gonna be like this Saturday. It’s gonna be crazy.”

He said about 60 police officers were brought in from the mainland, and two guards with machine guns were keeping watch over the Brinks truck holding the cash jackpot.

“We had to lock the town down,” he said.

Paulette Larade, who lives about a 40-minute drive away, has witnessed the chaos.

“I pity the poor people of Inverness,” she told Yahoo Canada News. “I hope somebody from Inverness wins, because they’ve had to put up with this. They can’t go get groceries. They can’t go anywhere because the roads are packed and traffic is unreal. People have waited three hours to get out of the parking lots.”

But if she wins, Larade said, she would head straight for the airport to visit her son, a new Mountie recruit who has been stationed in Manitoba.

Fraser said there’s been no trouble so far, and the town’s enterprising residents are prospering during what would normally be a quiet season: restaurants are full, kids are selling bottles of water and people are renting out their lawns for parking.

The legion, too, has been raking in the money, which it will split with the Inverness Cottage Workshop, an organization that offers employment training for adults with intellectual disabilities.

Still, with just five cards left, organizers say the game will end this Saturday: they will keep drawing until they have a winner.

“When we start another one up I think we’ll put a cap on it, because it’s just too much,” Fraser said. “Something bad could happen.”