'Chase the Ace' lotto game becoming all the rage after $1.7 M jackpot

Thousands of tickets were sold in Saturday's Chase the Ace draw.

With the flip of a card, a Maritime phenomenon was given new gusto.

Chase the Ace, the card-based lottery popular in Nova Scotia, has found new life, going from a game played by grannies in church halls to a popular pastime spreading to skating rinks and fairgrounds across the Atlantic region.

The revival is largely attributed a jackpot that ballooned from $2,000 to $1.7 million in Inverness, N.S., causing the little town of 1,300 to swell to 25,000 as people tested their luck. In the end, Donelda MacAskill, from Englishtown, N.S. ended the 48-week-long chase on Oct. 3 by pulling the ace of spades from three remaining cards.

Since then, similar games have popped up in nearby provinces. In Tignish, P.E.I., a prize of nearly $300,000 has begun drawing crowds. In New Brunswick, a 40,000-square-foot exhibition centre is hosting the lotto, with a minimum $1,000 jackpot.

“We’re hoping that people in Fredericton area and New Brunswick will support it and we can match what they did in Nova Scotia,” Mike Vokey, director of the Fredericton’s Capital Exhibit Centre, told CTV Atlantic.

The game is similar to a 50-50 draw in which players buy tickets for $5 each, and a draw is held for 20 per cent of the total ticket sales. The winner then has the chance to win a cumulative jackpot by picking the ace of spades from a deck of 52 playing cards -- with the deck shrinking and the pot growing each week.

And Chase the Ace’s newfound popularity is good news for the Nova Scotia government. Since 2012, the provincial government has issued about 300 licenses for the event, which are more or less free. But once the pot exceeds $50,000, the government steps in to collect 2.13 per cent of the winnings.

But as the game gains a new, larger following, the chances of drawing a winning ticket are reduced, a Nova Scotia mathematician says.

“And yet, you know, on the other hand, the paradox is that someone will win,” says Jason Brown, a mathematics professor at Dalhousie University. “So everyone thinks to themselves, why not me?”

With files from CTV Atlantic