Winner says B-I-N-G-O: City woman takes home more than $208,000

You could have almost heard a pin drop in the Kawartha Club Bingo hall yesterday between numbers being called in the daily Link game.

That’s a game played over satellite link by players at 40 bingo parlours across Ontario.

It was “the nurse” who broke the silence with a blood-curdling scream, said employee Kirsten Moniz.

“She just screamed it,” Moniz said about a half hour after Peterborough resident Linda Hancock won $208,231.74. “All of us at the front said that’s the big one.”

It was the big one because Hancock, who plays bingo about three times a week on her way home from work at MDS Laboratories, always buys the bonus.

For an extra buck, she said she increases her chances of winning the big ones.

And yesterday she did. “I can retire,” she said, her voice shaking on the last word, still dabbing the next set of cards she’d bought when she came in for her afternoon relax time.

“It doesn’t look like I’m relaxing, but I am.” Someone had called a false bingo three numbers before hers, Hancock said.

“I was just sitting here saying, ‘3’ and ‘73,’” she said. “So was he,” she said, pointing to a man playing across the table from her.

Brooke Robinson, manager at the bingo hall, said she heard the scream in her office at the other end of the building.

“At one point I didn’t know who was more excited, Linda or us,” she said.

If Hancock, 57, had not purchased the bonus on that game, or won on a card other than the bonus one, she would have received about $1,000, Robinson said.

In an average month, the club hands over about $45,000 to winners of their various bingos, she said.

The last big win was April 26, 2006, when a customer won $182,000. The largest prize ever won at the hall was about $250,000, Robinson said.

Yesterday afternoon Hancock hadn’t told her husband yet. “He doesn’t like me playing,” she said. “Maybe now he won’t mind.”

She planned to tell him as soon as she got home.

She had called her mother, who won $25,000 playing bingo at the club a few years ago.

Hancock, now a Lily Lake Road resident, grew up and raised her family in Peterborough. She has worked for MDS Laboratories for just more than 25 years, she said. The last 20 of them, she has done house calls to collect blood and samples from patients who are unable to get to a lab.

“Everybody has their lucky time,” she said, quietly. “I chose to work. It’s not that I had a hard life. But now, I can retire,” she said, her eyes glistening.