Watching in breathless anticipation
There’s a new spectator sport for folks in the Maritimes. Keeps people watching for hours, week after week. No need to catch a ball, or anything precise; in fact, the name “Chase The Ace” explains the game. Sort of. Three weeks ago, I didn’t even know the game existed; now, like so many others, I’ve watched in breathless anticipation for the “turn of a friendly card”.
Let me explain. A local service club in Cape Breton decided to hold a fund raiser, starting almost a year ago. The rules were simple. Buy tickets. Wait for your ticket to be drawn. Come up and choose one card from a single deck. If you get the right card (the Ace of Spades), you win the lion’s share of the ticket sales. No, that wasn’t the service club, just for the record.
Except that the odds of drawing the right card are really high, in the beginning. They do discard your draw at the end of a week, decreasing the deck depth. But, and here’s the game, the number of tickets sold seems to grow in direct proportion to the value of the share (it increases, each week, as a consequence of sales). By tonight, the FINAL night, the pot had reached over $1.7 million, and the fame quotient is right through the roof.
Live streaming on CBC (although, seriously, a cellphone data stream??). An arena filled with participating spectators, for hours on end. Multiple sites, so that the eventual winners had to drive over from whereever… by the time the (eventual) winner arrived, her hands were shaking too much to sign the documents. And win, she did!
To give you an idea of the ticket sales, here’s the CBC reporter, in among the cardboard stubs:
Chase The Ace
turns out there’s a local derivative game, called “Dig For The Deuce”. Now I understand those posters around town.
