A Silver Spring woman cashed in $100,000 after two identical Maryland Lottery Pick 5 tickets both hit the same evening drawing, a double score on her usual numbers.
The unnamed resident bought a pair of $1 tickets for the Sept. 27 midday and evening Pick 5 drawings, both carrying the same five digits: 62626. Those tickets matched the evening results and paid two $50,000 prizes, for a combined windfall of $100,000, UPI reported.
She purchased the tickets at State Line Market on Eastern Avenue in Silver Spring. She told Maryland Lottery officials she always plays 62626 on Pick 5.
When she checked the results the next day, the shock hit hard enough that she stopped the car.
"I had to pull over," she said.
A portion of the prize money, she said, will go toward home improvement projects.
The setup was simple. Two identical $1 bets. One set of numbers. Midday and evening drawings on the same date. The evening draw is what paid.
Maryland Lottery officials received her account of the purchase and the win. The retailer that sold the tickets was State Line Market, a Silver Spring stop on Eastern Avenue that now sits behind one of the cleaner lottery stories of the season: no drama, no dispute, just a player who stuck with the same combination and bought it twice.
Pick 5 is a straight numbers game. Players pick five digits and can enter more than one drawing. Buying two matching tickets for the same slate of numbers is allowed. When both tickets land on a winning draw, both pay. That is exactly what happened here.
The woman remains unnamed in the public account. What is clear is the sequence: she played her regular numbers, paid $2 total across the two tickets, matched the evening result, and woke up the next day to a six-figure surprise before taxes and whatever claim process the lottery requires.
She did not describe a complicated system or a last-minute switch. She used 62626 because that is what she always uses. The second ticket was the difference between one prize and two.
After the win, her stated plan was practical. Some of the money is earmarked for work on the house. No yacht talk. No sudden career change. Home improvement.
That fits the rest of the story. A regular player. A neighborhood market. A familiar number string. Two cheap tickets instead of one. The evening draw lined up, and both tickets counted.
Lottery wins this size do not rewrite state budgets or settle policy fights. They do remind readers that the rules still work the same for the person who walks in, pays cash or card, and takes the slip home. She played legally. The tickets were valid. The prizes were real.
Silver Spring sits just north of Washington, D.C., in Montgomery County territory familiar to anyone who has driven the Maryland side of the capital region. State Line Market’s name hints at the D.C. border stretch along Eastern Avenue. That is the local color the public record supplies. The rest is the win itself.
UPI carried the account on Oct. 16, drawing on what the player told Maryland Lottery officials. The drawing date was Sept. 27. She checked the numbers the following day and had to pull over when the result sank in.
Two tickets. Same numbers. One evening draw. One hundred thousand dollars. And a to-do list that starts with the house.
In a country that argues plenty about free money, this one still came the old way, she bought the tickets and the numbers hit.
