Marquette County woman wins $492,000 playing Fantasy 5
Courtesy: Michigan State Lottery
LANSING — Patience paid off for a lucky Marquette County woman who won $492,789 playing the Michigan Lottery’s Fantasy 5 game.
After several years of regularly playing Fantasy 5, the woman, saw all five of her hand-picked numbers drawn on Thursday: 01-04-08-19-24. The winner, who chose to remain anonymous, bought her lucky ticket at Harvey Mini Mart located at 1630 U.S. 41 West in Ishpeming.
“We are very excited,” said Tammie Alanen, the bookkeeper/manager for both the Marquette and west Ishpeming Cenex (Harvey’s Mini Mart) stores. “We hope that it is somebody local and one of our regulars.”
“We don’t know who it is, but it is very exciting when someone wins that much money,” Alanen said. “(We) don’t know (the winner’s name) sometimes the lottery will tell us and sometimes we find out later.”
The winner plans to save most of her windfall after making a few modest purchases.
Each Fantasy 5 play is only $1. For an additional $1 per play, EZmatch may be added to a Fantasy 5 ticket, giving players a chance to win up to $500 instantly. Fantasy 5 players select five numbers from one to 39. Players who match all five Fantasy 5 numbers drawn win a jackpot guaranteed to start at $100,000. Fantasy 5 drawings are held seven days a week at 7:29 p.m.
About 95 cents of every dollar spent on Lottery tickets is returned to the state in the form of contributions to the state School Aid Fund, prizes to players and commissions to retailers. In the 2013 fiscal year, the contribution to schools was $734.3 million. Since it began in 1972, the Lottery has contributed more than $18 billion to education in Michigan.