A Willetton woman who won $200,000 from a $20 Scratch’N’Win card said her heart “stopped beating” when she found out how much she had won.
Jayde Hicks and Jordan Ross cashed in a Scratch’N’Win, or “scratchie”, at the Lucky Charm news stand at Southlands Boulevarde last week not knowing they were holding a winning ticket.
When the cashier told them they had the winning ticket with a $200,000 prize, Ms Hicks jumped around in excitement.
“My eyes were so wide,” she said.
“I couldn’t believe I was so lucky to win that amount, the most I’ve ever won was $100.”
Ms Hicks said she could not believe her luck after years of buying scratchies.
Lucky Charm News in Southlands has been in the news before.
It sold a division one lottery ticket in 2015 – winning its holder over $800,000.
Ms Hicks’ frustration at taking so long to win should come as no surprise – big prizes are hard to come by on LotteryWest scratchies.
The couple’s card was called “Cash Vault” and promised a pool of $2.8 million in prizes.
However, the $200,000 top prize was featured in only two cards out of 200,000 on the market.
The second highest prize was a much lower $5000 – and there were only two of those printed.
There is only one $2000 third prize ticket.
The odds state that players are much more likely to win one of the minimum prizes at $25.
There were 17,522 of those available when the tickets were released.
In total there were 200,000 “Cash Vault” cards on the market with only 67,066 winners.
LotteryWest said odds of winning a prize were 1 in 2.89 but these winners included 7958 “free ticket” prizes, meaning no cash returns for players and another chance at winning.
Subtracting them from the prize pool left 59,108 cash winners in the pool – or a 1 in 3.38 chance of winning a profit off your card.
Taking out cards with $20 cash returns, which is the cost of the ticket, punters had slightly under a one-in-four chance of making a profit.
According to LotteryWest the top two prizes of $200,000 had now been claimed for the Cash Vault series and as of January 20 only one top prize of $300,000 remained in its entire $20 Scratch’N’Win series.
