A woman from Ashland set a Kentucky Lottery record last weekend after hitting a jackpot worth more than $500,000.
Last Saturday, Angela Ryan won $504,000 playing the Cleopatra Clusters Jackpot. It’s one of the Kentucky Lottery online games.
The more than half-million-dollar score is the largest Instant Play win in the history of the Kentucky Lottery’s online offerings. After taxes, Ryan’s $1 wager turned into a take-home prize of $360,386.
Ryan’s record-setting jackpot made for a memorable Mother’s Day
She hit the jackpot on Saturday, May 13. In other words, it was a day before Mother’s Day. The timing of the victory only made the money sweeter.
According to a press release from the Kentucky Lottery Commission, Ryan recently lost her mother.
“It was special,” Ryan said via the release. “I was thinking of her and thought, ‘I’m going to win this.'”
Ryan is a mother herself. She and her husband, Reece, have two adult children and two grandchildren. They own a pair of food truck businesses and plan on using the money to pay off outstanding debt and expand the business.
Kentucky is one of 8 states to offer online lottery games
Kentucky has no history of being a state with many gambling options. Kentucky horse racing betting and the state lottery are the only two forms of gambling currently available.
In March, Gov. Andy Beshear signed sports betting legislation. But the industry won’t launch until later this year. And it’s the first gambling expansion since the lottery was created in 1989.
However, the state is one of just eight states that allow those inside its borders to play the lottery online.
Besides the Bluegrass State, Virginia, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, New Hampshire, Michigan, Illinois and Georgia also offer these games.
Kentucky was one of the first to offer an online lottery. These games were made available by the Kentucky Lottery in 2016. It was the third state to have both in-person and online lottery games.
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