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July 14, 2009
 It’s always a good idea to help your friends, but for James Cooke of Rustburg, it was worth a half-million dollars. Mr. Cooke won $500,000 in the Virginia Lottery’s Lucky Casino Scratcher game.
It happened when a friend called and asked Mr. Cooke to help him out for the day. Afterward, they stopped at Burley’s Markets Inc., located at 14074 Wards Road in Lynchburg. While there, Mr. Cooke bought a Lucky Casino ticket and took it out to the car to scratch. That’s when he realized it was a $500,000 winner.
“If we hadn’t stopped there, I never would have bought it,” he told Lottery officials when he claimed his prize, along with his wife, Linda.
The store receives a $10,000 bonus from the Lottery for selling the ticket.
Lucky Casino is one of dozens of Scratcher games from the Virginia Lottery. Mr. Cooke is the first player to claim the top prize, which means three top-prize tickets are unclaimed.
Nearly 95 cents of each dollar spent on the Virginia Lottery by players goes back to the Commonwealth in the form of contributions to education, prizes and retailer commissions. Since 1999, all Virginia Lottery profits have been designated solely to K-12 public school education in the Commonwealth. In that time, the Lottery has turned over more than $4 billion for Virginia’s public schools. The latest annual profits of $455 million currently represent about 6 percent of state funding for public education in Virginia. In 20 years, the Lottery has sold more than $20 billion in tickets, awarded more than $1 billion in retailer commissions and paid more than $10.9 billion in prizes to players.
For more information, visit www.valottery.com. Please play responsibly.
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