One-in-12 chance to win $400K
Marathon Chase the Ace game down to a dozen cards; next weekly winner will pocket handsome prize plus chance for jackpot
Paul Bickford
Northern News Services
Monday, October 17, 2016
HAY RIVER
Anticipation and adrenalin ran high again in Hay River on Friday night but the elusive Ace of Spades remained in the pared-down deck while the jackpot grew to almost $270,000 for next week's draw.
Chase the Ace has been attracting people to Hay River into the Ptarmigan Inn - they crowd into the bar, restaurant, downstairs conference rooms and even outside waiting for the draw - from surrounding communities.
Along with Fort Providence, players come from Fort Resolution, Fort Smith, Enterprise and even further afield.
The most recent draw, Oct. 14, did provide a nice prize of $25,523 for Kayla Leishman of Fort Providence, who drew the jack of spades. The weekly prize and the progressive jackpot when added together created a total potential prize of $294,387.
For the next draw on Oct. 21 there will be 12 cards left in the deck, and the jackpot will rise depending on the ticket sales on that date.
Chase the Ace, this time run by the the Hay River Curling Club, is a simple enough game.
Each Friday night, people can buy $5 tickets for a draw. The holder of the winning ticket automatically gets a weekly prize and a chance to draw from a deck of cards - placed in a black box - in search of the ace of spades. The person who eventually draws the ace of spades will win a progressive jackpot.
For the draw on Oct. 14, the ticket sales totalled $127,615 - all raised in an hour and a half from when sales began at 6:30 p.m. and ended at 8 p.m.
The total raised each week is divided as follows: 50 per cent to the organization staging the Chase the Ace, 30 per cent to the progressive jackpot and 20 per cent to the weekly prize.
The Oct. 14 jackpot of $268,864 was not won. If ticket sales leading up to the Oct. 14 draw rival those of last week, the jackpot could sit near $400,000.
Chase the Ace has grown into a social event in the town. In addition to packing the Ptarmigan Inn, folks gather at a number of other locations where tickets are sold, including the Royal Canadian Legion, Riverview Cineplex and the Back Eddy restaurant. An estimated 600 or more people usually crowd into the various locations.
Those people and others anywhere can also follow the draw on Facebook. On Oct. 14, about 1,000 people were watching online.
Hay River's population is just more than 3,600.
Now as the community's first Chase the Ace nears its end, town council is still undecided about how to determine which group will get the next lottery licence for the potentially lucrative game.
But councillors are thinking about how the process might work.
The selection process and a proposed change in the way the Town of Hay River charges lottery licence fees for Chase the Ace were discussed at the Oct. 3 meeting of council's public works committee.
Speaking following the meeting, Mayor Brad Mapes said he doesn't expect the decision on who will get the next licence to become an issue.
"You (have) to understand the whole situation of it," he told News/North.
"Not just any group could take and grab Chase the Ace. It also takes a lot of manpower to do it."
Plus, he said a group would need a place to run it.
During the Oct. 3 meeting, town administration recommended, and council agreed, the awarding of a new licence for Chase the Ace not occur until changes to the Lottery Licensing Bylaw are enacted.
What those changes will be has yet to be decided.
"Is it first come, first serve?" asked deputy mayor Donna Lee Jungkind. "What's the basis for who gets the next?"
Coun. Vince McKay expressed the opinion that awarding a licence is an issue for the administration to handle.
"If it becomes a contentious issue then it becomes a political thing, obviously," he said.
Coun. Keith Dohey also said it is an administration issue, once policy is set.
"But there's no policy right now behind this," he said. "So if there's five applications, administration has no idea who's next, as it sits right now.
"I think it's important that we actually have some rules."
The proposal is to change the existing graduated fee structure - which is now from $50 to $1,500 depending on the prize size - to a fee of five per cent of a prize per draw. A $50 application fee would remain.
And 100 per cent of the money the town receives would help pay off a debenture, which has not yet been taken out, for the Rec Centre reconstruction.
- with files from James O'Connor
