Man gets wife’s license plate numbers wrong in lottery game. ‘Happy mistake’ pays off

A man tried using his wife’s license plate number in a lottery game but got the number wrong, Maryland officials said.

He still won big.

The Harford County man saw a Pick 5 drawing and thought he had “missed his chance” at winning, according to an April 5 news release by the Maryland Lottery. The winning numbers matched his own license plate.

But a week later he bought a ticket in Churchville that was carrying a $50,000 prize, officials said.

“It was killing me that I’d missed out on my plate,” the warehouse manager told lottery officials. “So, I decided to play my wife’s tag numbers.”

He checked his Maryland Lottery app on his phone “but couldn’t remember the exact order of his wife’s license plate,” officials said.

“I thought that maybe I had the order right, too, but wasn’t sure until I found the darn ticket,” he said in the release.

The lucky winner picked two numbers out of order, but it turned out to be a “happy mistake” as they were in the same order as the winning results, officials said.

The man plans to use the money toward bills, savings and a vacation, officials said.

Churchville is about a 30-mile drive northeast from Baltimore.