![]() ![]() This summer was when the lottery’s popularity began to grow rapidly. The winning ticket also took home a twenty-per-cent cut of the day’s ticket sales, to keep people coming back. In this village with Scottish roots and a lingering brogue, they were an excuse to gather, have a drink, and listen to Celtic music. Early on, the drawings lasted a couple of hours. This was in part because, unlike a traditional lottery, “Chase the Ace” required that contestants buy a ticket in person on the day of the drawing, and then stick around in order to claim their winnings. As the purse increased, so did the crowds. It took over a month to add the first thousand dollars to the pot, and eighteen rounds to push the jackpot above ten thousand dollars. Each weekend, volunteers sold tickets at the Inverness Legion, and each weekend the jackpot ticked slightly higher. I’d be lying if I said this was a grand plan.”Īt first, the small-town lottery inched along without much fanfare. “When it reached fifty-nine thousand dollars we thought we were really in the money, but then summer hit and people started flooding in,” says Cameron MacQuarrie, chairman of the “Chase the Ace” contest committee. This coming Saturday, the jackpot will be at least $1.2 million. When the contest began, last October, the jackpot was around two hundred dollars, so the organizers kicked in some extra cash to sweeten the deal. The lottery was a raffle-and-cards hybrid in which the grand prize rolled over every week until a lotto winner picked the ace of spades from the deck. A year ago, local organizers started a lottery, “Chase the Ace,” to raise funds for a small community center. Inverness is a fishing village with a reach of a mile or so of coastal highway in Nova Scotia, Canada. ![]()
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