A few weeks after the National Lottery was launched here in the UK I won £1300/$1900. As it had just started, I thought ‘this is easy - roll on the next big win.’ I have won a few £10s in the intervening years, but nothing big. We had a good holiday in the US on the back of the win.
I won our office fantasy football league this year $650. I’ve won a couple of thousand a few times in casinos.
About 20 years ago I won $400 in a daily three drawing. At that point I figured I had broke even so I quit playing.
When my sister and I were kids we won a three foot tall solid chocolate Easter bunny from a local candy store. They were running a contest to name it and the store liked our name best. I think we had chunks of that chocolate in our freezer for a year afterward.
The last post reminded me- when I was in first grade, they had a contest to decorate a 8" tall styrofoam Easter egg.
My mom worked really hard all week on decorating that egg-used feathers and ribbon, etc. I’m not sure how they thought a 6 year old did it, but hey, we won!
We were all excited to go pick up the first place prize-we had no idea what it was, but it was going to be good!
A rabbit.
My mom was not pleased.
First one;
My (now late) brother suffered brain damage at 35 and lived in a group home of like injured folks. He played the lotto all the time hoping to win enough to move out to his own place. So one day just to show him what a sucker bet the lotto is I bought him $20 of scratch offs. Of course he hit one for $1000.00. Worst lesson ever.
Second one
Local Catholic High School fund raiser Crab and Steak feed. Dungeness Crab. And beer. Drinking beer and eating crab in the Catholic High School Auditorium. Very surreal. Anyway I bought one $20 raffle ticket. I won the grand prize, 52 inch Toshiba Flat Screen TV. I’d been shopping and researching big screens at the time and this was one of my top 10. The store that donated it listed the Retail Price on the tax form at about 2 1/2 times what it really was (tax foolies?) but no biggie. I still got a very expensive TV for under $300. Still in my family room 12 years later.
That’s all I got.
When I was about 10, I was with my parents at one of their friend’s houses. The men were playing a game called Hi-Lo and lost a player. They invited me to play. I hadn’t played the game before but the rules were pretty simple. My dad gave me a dime to bet with. I walked away with about $40. I paid back the dime :).
I’ve won $500 on scratch off tickets a few times (maybe three), and just over $200 on a slot machine once.
My grandmother won $1000 a week for life on a scratch off ticket in 1994 (actually 62 was the cut off age, and this was a year and a half before she turned 62) and ended up taking the lump sum. It worked out to around 350,000, paid out on yearly installments of about 70,000 for five years. Most ended up on medical bills.
I won $500 last year on a no-stakes promotion in an online sports betting house, coming in first among people picking the outcome of a season of football games.
14 M&Ms. It’s OK, I don’t expect everybody to be as cool as me.
When I was 8, my school took part in a county (Cheshire) wide ‘Design a Christmas card’ competition. If I remember correctly, the prize was £500 for the 10 winners plus tea with the mayor, and £2000 for their school. The ten winnind cards were going to be printed up and sold all over the county.
Anyway, I did a neat card featuring Santa climbing up a local landmark, and forgot about it. A few months later, we moved house, and I moved to a new school. I’d been there a week, when my new school got phoned by my old one to say the winners for the card contest had just been announced, and I’d won!!! thousands of entries (every school in the county was entering), and mine was in the top ten! My new school announced it in our daily assembly; it was awesome, I was so excited about it
The teacher said they’d passed on my new details, so I waited to hear from them.
And waited.
And waited
It was nearly Christmas by the time I realised it wasn’t going to happen
They never did get in touch. I assume they decided that, as I no longer lived in the county at the time of judging, I was disqualified, but the bastards didn’t even have the decency to let me know. If they’d sent me an apology for announcing me a winner before checking I was actually eligible to win, and maybe a £5 book token or something, I would have been happy.
But no; YOU WON!!! Then silence.
One of the very first times that I played the lottery, I won $100. Not so much luck since then.
I won a crappy transistor radio back in the 70s. The volume control quit working almost immediately.
I won a plastic airplane model for naming the Alaska governor’s jet in a radio contest back when Gov. Murkowski was being roundly excoriated for his decision to buy said jet. My entry: Bald Ego. The plastic version didn’t survive our next move, and the real thing was sold by Sarah Palin.
I won $10.00 from Publisher’s Clearinghouse last year. A check just showed up in my mailbox one day.
Update: I’ve just won 8 bucks in the most recent Powerball drawing. OK, so I spent $20 on the tickets, but hey, it’s something.
Pure genius.
Once I bought a $2 Scratch-Off Ticket at a local bodega, just for fun, and yelled at the clerk:
“Hey! I won! Ummm… $2…”
“Yay. D’ya wanta buy a new Scratch-Off Ticket with the cash?”
“Why would I waste $2 on one of those?”
I won $500 on slot machines at a casino last Thanksgiving. I had won $500 before at another casino, but I put it all back in, so when I got the money this most recent time, I kept it and quit.
I won a trip to Puerto Vallarta on Jeopardy!
People really DO win those things! (Aw, heck, I’ve been saying that ever since one of my brother’s classmates won $5,000 some years back. 
)
I got a $50 scratch-off lottery ticket back when the Iowa lottery was fairly new, and I also was a $72 gasoline card in a contest my dad entered for me, so of course it was mine. 
We won $1200. in The Texas lottery 10 or 15 years ago. At the time we needed new tires on the truck and the boat trailer, so that’s what we did with it. Then took a bunch of kids to the lake and burned the rest in fuel and fun times. Wasted? Maybe except that we still hear from some of those kids who now have kids of their own, and when we see them they remember those as good times.
Wasn’t a lottery, but I once won a draw the name from the hat contest for two tickets and a parking pass to go to a Dallas Cowboys game in the company skybox on the 50 yard line with the company president of a very very large company. It was quite the deal, very fancy. I was just a secretary, but the vp’s I worked for and some of the other staff and secretaries were in a tizzy. 'You’ve been here three weeks and you win? I’ve been trying to win for YEARS."
That’s what the DJ who called me said! My wife always tells me that I should have been in advertising. 