"Is that even a thing?": Man couldn't believe he won one of Canada's largest lottery prizes

A Calgary man says he could barely process his staggering $70,000,000 Lotto Max win earlier this fall.

Mitchel Dyck told the Western Canada Lottery Corporation (WCLC) he doesn’t usually play the lottery, but when a cashier asks if he wants a lottery ticket he doesn’t hesitate to say yes.

Lucky for him, he said yes to adding a ticket for the October 21 Lotto Max draw to his other purchases from Centex Bearspaw at 25238 Township Road in Calgary on October 7. But little did he know that that decision would be life-altering.

Dyck’s spur-of-the-moment purchase matched all seven winning numbers – 1, 9, 25, 35, 41, 43, and 50 – to win the massive $70 million jackpot that tantalized players for 21 draws in a row this fall.

Calgary’s newest multi-millionaire discovered his win when he asked a cashier to check his
tickets at a local store three weeks after the draw on November 7.

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“I handed it to the cashier who scanned it; I thought we won $70,000!” he recalled as he
claimed his prize. “We tried to count the zeroes, but the numbers flew by quickly.”

“I already had goosebumps!” he added. But those goosebumps were nothing – when Dyck
and the cashier realized he had won 10 times that amount, he could barely process what
was happening.

“Then we started counting and realized it’s $70 million. I thought, ‘Is that even a thing!?’” Dyck said, recalling how surreal the moment felt. “It was just something you never expect.”

He explained that the next few moments were a blur, followed by the stress of having a very valuable piece of paper. “I followed the cashier to the back room – he was calling the prize office to verify my win, and I wasn’t going to let that ticket out of my sight!”

“It was definitely nerve-wracking to have [the ticket] overnight,” he laughed. “We went the
next day and got a safety deposit box for it.”

Dyck said he and his family are still adjusting to the idea of having $70 million, and plan to be smart about how they approach the windfall.

“We found a private banker who will help us manage this,” he said. “For right now, it’s just
going in the bank until we can make some more plans.”

At $70 million, Dyck’s win is the largest jackpot ever won by an Alberta winner, according to a news release from the WCLC.

Dyck nabbed his $70 million Lotto Max jackpot after a record 21-draw rollover from mid-August to late October. His win marks the second time a $70 million jackpot has been won in the Prairie provinces and the North since the jackpot cap was increased to that level in May 2019.

In April of this year, a Regina winner picked up a Lotto Max ticket in Dunmore, Alberta, on the way to a family ski trip in BC that netted him $70 million – a win now tied with Dyck’s for the largest in Western Canada.