A 64-year-old Genesee County man was not planning to buy any lottery tickets on his way home from vacation. But when the customer ahead of him in line at a Shell station on South Main Street in Standish bought a handful of scratch-offs, he decided to grab a few of his own — two Detroit Tigers instant tickets for himself, and two Cashword tickets for his wife.
He did not check the tickets until that evening, back at home. According to WNEM, one of the Tigers tickets turned out to be a $500,000 winner.
We sat down at the table later that night and scratched our tickets. When I saw I had a $500,000 winner, I was in disbelief.
Genesee County lottery winner, to WNEM
The $5 Detroit Tigers instant game launched in April 2025 and offers prizes ranging from $5 up to the top $500,000 payout; players have collectively won more than $26 million on the game so far, UPI reported. The winner, who asked to remain anonymous, said he plans to set the prize aside as a retirement cushion and share some of it with his children.
The win adds to a small string of impulse lottery jackpots tied to roadside stops this August. In Kentucky, an Alabama family driving through Franklin turned a restroom break at a Pilot Travel Center into a $150,000 Powerball prize for the Aug. 1 drawing. And in Maryland, a truck driver bought a $10 scratch ticket at a Severna Park convenience store between deliveries and won $50,000, a result he says he triple-checked before believing it. Days earlier, a woman in Arkansas turned an unplanned, computer-picked ticket into a $100,000 win, according to a separate UPI report.
Cashword, the crossword-style scratch game his wife bought at the same stop, works differently from the Tigers ticket: players scratch a grid of letters and win based on how many words they can complete, with prizes typically far smaller than a single top-tier instant win. On this trip, the couple's biggest prize came from the ticket bought almost as an afterthought.