Chase the Ace in Canada: how the rolling jackpot works, the odds, and who licenses it

Chase the Ace is a progressive raffle that charities run once a week, usually from a Legion hall, fire station or community centre. You buy a ticket. One ticket is drawn. Its owner wins a modest cash prize and also gets to pick one card from a deck. If it is the ace of spades, they win the accumulated jackpot. If not, the card is taken out of the deck, the jackpot carries over, and everyone comes back next week. CBC described it as something like a 50-50 draw, except that the winner gets a smaller cut and a chance at the big prize.

The rules, week by week

The structure is the same everywhere, even if the details differ. Tickets are sold in a fixed window on or just before draw day. A winning ticket is drawn, and the holder chooses one of the face-down cards. The chosen card is shown to the room and removed. Manitoba's Liquor, Gaming and Cannabis Authority spells out the mechanics in its standard rules of play: the remaining cards are laid face up in view of the players before each draw, shuffled and placed face down before the player chooses, and nobody may touch or handle the cards in play. Once the chase card is selected, a new series begins at the following event with a fresh deck.

Ticket money is usually split in three: about 50% to the organizers, 20% to the weekly draw winner and 30% to the jackpot. That is a typical pattern, not a rule. Manitoba requires each licensee's house rules to state how every prize is calculated from gross sales, and says the accumulating prize must be a percentage of gross sales.

Deck size varies too. Manitoba allows a series deck of up to 52 cards plus two jokers, and notes that a series may run for 52 to 54 events. Nova Scotia's licensing conditions policy covers a maximum number of draws, record keeping, how to run the lottery and notice of changes.

Why the jackpot snowballs

The brief version is that the jackpot is fed by sales, and sales are fed by the jackpot. Each week a fixed share of ticket money is added to the pot. That alone would grow it in a straight line. What turns it into a curve is the crowd: as the deck shrinks and the headline number climbs, more people buy tickets, so the weekly addition itself grows.

Here is an illustration, using made-up round numbers. Suppose week one sells C$2,000 in tickets and sales rise 25% a week, with 30% of sales going to the jackpot.

Real games follow the same feedback loop. CBC reported that in Inverness, Nova Scotia, only 35 tickets were sold in the first week, and in the summer of 2015, once the deck was down to 11 cards, crowds started building. By late August the jackpot was climbing by tens of thousands of dollars a week and was forecast to reach C$350,000 to C$400,000 with nine cards left. Sales hours were extended to three hours and parking was restricted.

The odds, card by card

Here is the part the excitement hides. The ace of spades is equally likely to be any of the cards still in the deck, so with N cards left the chance that this week's winner pulls it is exactly 1 in N.

Your personal chance is that number divided by the number of tickets. If 2,000 tickets are in the draw and nine cards remain, your chance of winning the jackpot is 1 in 2,000 for the draw, then 1 in 9, so 1 in 18,000, or about 0.0056%. With a jackpot of C$400,000, one ticket therefore carries about C$22 of expected jackpot value (C$400,000 / 18,000), before counting the small weekly prize. Compare that with what the ticket cost you, and with the fact that the charity keeps a large share of every sale.

Also notice how rarely a standard 52-card game gets deep. The chance that the ace is still hidden when nine cards remain is 9 in 52, about 17.3%, and the chance it lasts to the final three is 3 in 52, about 5.8%. Games that grow into national news are the exception, not the norm, and most series end while the jackpot is still modest.

The famous ones, and what they taught regulators

The community of Noel, Nova Scotia, is generally credited with running the first licensed Chase the Ace game in the province in 2013, and records that its jackpot paid C$209,752.50. The Inverness game, run by the village's Royal Canadian Legion branch and raising money for the Inverness Cottage Workshop for adults with developmental disabilities, then became a national story. By late September 2015 it was near C$1.5 million with six cards left, and in early October the ace came out of a deck of three cards for a prize of about C$1.7 million. Global News reported that the ace had stayed hidden for nearly a year. A Sydney game later reached a larger prize of about C$2.9 million in May 2016.

Success brought scrutiny. In Sydney, two identical ticket numbers were drawn after duplicate tickets had been sold. Nova Scotia's business minister said he wanted a Chartered Professional Accountant to oversee the games, so ticket buyers could trust the integrity of the draw. Prince Edward Island meanwhile said it had issued licences to 25 community groups by October 2015. The lesson for small groups: the smaller games are not guaranteed to be profitable. One P.E.I. Legion with 18 cards left had raised about C$5,000 and a C$3,831.50 jackpot.

How provinces license it

Chase the Ace is a lottery scheme, and under the Criminal Code only governments and licensed organizations can lawfully run one. Section 207(1)(b) lets a charitable or religious organization conduct a lottery scheme under a licence issued by a province's Lieutenant Governor in Council or a person or authority the province designates, as long as the proceeds go to a charitable or religious purpose. Section 206 makes it an offence to run a lottery scheme without that authority. For the wider legal picture see our guide to Canadian gambling laws.

Each province then writes its own conditions. Manitoba treats it as a licensed raffle with standard rules, and Nova Scotia has a separate licensing conditions policy. Some details from news coverage of Inverness are conditions set by the organizers rather than law: tickets were available at only two locations, on the day of the draw, the winner had to be present, and buyers had to be 19 or older. Ages differ by province, so check yours. Winnings from a licensed raffle are generally not taxed in Canada, though income earned on them is.

How to play sensibly

• Find the licence. A legitimate game names the charity and the licensing authority, and posts the prize split and the cards left.
• Do the arithmetic. Divide 1 by the number of cards left, then by the tickets in the draw, and compare that to the cost of your ticket.
• Price it as a donation. The charity keeps roughly half in a typical split, so a ticket is mostly a contribution with a lottery attached.
• Beware pressure when the jackpot is huge. A bigger crowd means more tickets sharing the same 1 in N, which lowers your odds.
• Set a weekly cap and stick to it. Our responsible gambling page has tools and helplines. For the games run by provincial lotteries, see our page on Canadian provincial casinos.