Winner was ready to give it away without a second thought

By Kate Northrop

CRESAPTOWN, Md. — A Maryland man almost gave away a winning lottery ticket worth $50,000 had it not been for a last-second intervention.

A Maryland resident is grateful that he just barely avoided giving away a $50,000 lottery ticket in a trade that would have been rather unequal.

Air Force veteran John Hamilton Jr. had a $40 debt to settle with his friend, and thanks to his wife, he avoided a wildly lopsided deal.

He enjoys playing the higher priced scratch-off lottery games and found himself at Sheetz on McMullen Highway in Cresaptown on July 3. While there, he purchased a $50 "$5,000,000 LUXE" scratch-off ticket to feed his interests.

Hamilton Jr. folded the ticket and tucked it in his back pocket to play later, but it went forgotten until the following day.

He ran into a friend and remembered he owed him $40. That's when he recalled the $50 lottery ticket in his pocket and offered it to his friend to settle up.

"I told him it could be something on it," Hamilton Jr. said to the Maryland Lottery.

Right as he was handing off the scratch-off ticket, his wife intervened and told him not to give it away.

"She put her hand between us and intercepted the play," the Cumberland resident recalled in a press release. "That's when I thought I should play it and see if it really was a winner."

Hamilton Jr. went back to the car to scratch the ticket, and the relief was already setting in as soon as he started playing. The ticket began revealing wins all along the top row, and it made him so nervous that he stopped scratching and went back into the convenience store to have the cashier scan it.

"I showed [the clerk] and asked, 'Was it real? And she said, 'Looks like it,' and that I should scratch the rest of it," he told Lottery officials.

Once he scratched the rest of the ticket, it became apparent that he made the right choice in keeping it. The play area revealed more wins, one after the other, and it was so overwhelming that he couldn't do the math to add it all up.

"But I knew it was big," he grinned.

He handed it back to the cashier to scan it again, and she confirmed it was a winner for $50,000. After that, he immediately called his wife to tell her about the win. Were it not for her, he would have given it away.

The father visited Lottery headquarters in Baltimore on July 21 to claim the third-tier prize, which he says he'll use to take his three youngest children on a Disney cruise and pay his mortgage.

"I was dumbfounded," he related to Lottery staff when claiming his prize.

The $50 "$5,000,000 LUXE" scratch-off game launched in February with three available top prizes of $5 million, two of which remain. There are also eight out of ten second-tier prizes of $200,000 left, as well as nine out of 12 third-tier prizes of $50,000 following Hamilton Jr.'s win.

The overall odds of winning any prize in the game are 1 in 2.50.

(Click to display full-size in gallery)John Hamilton Jr. is grateful to his wife for saving him from giving away his $50,000-winning $5,000,000 LUXE scratch-off ticket.