Chase the Ace

A story of Inverness Madness

The sleepy town of Inverness, home of (as quoted from Wikipedia) "Randi copley drafted by the Rangers and super-wicket up the track on the pick fore."

This Saturday, the small town of Inverness will more than double it's modest population for the most interesting thing to happen in the fishing town since that rad harness race that one time. You remember that totally sweet harness race, right? It was wicked! So, what is this amazing white-knuckle thrill ride causing a mass pilgrimage to the west side of the island? Well, for those of you who can't read titles, it's to watch someone cut a deck of cards.

"Dammit Garry! Not like that. You're drunk. Go Home."

I'm talking about Chase the Ace, which has officially gotten out of hand in Inverness. So, how does one play Chase the Ace? Well, I pretty much went over it in the last paragraph, but if you need to be spoon fed this stuff like some sort of feral child, I'll go a bit deeper into it. 

                    Step 1: Buy tickets.

                    Step 2: Get your ticket drawn.

                    Step 3: Cut a deck of cards. At this point, 1 of 2 things will happen.

Potential Thing #1: You draw the Ace! Congratulations! You can now afford a multitude of bad habits.

Potential Thing #2: You draw something other than the Ace. Go home, cry, and watch your dreams die as the sun sets on what could have been the best day of your life.

Actually, you win money even if you don't draw the Ace, so you would probably look something like this.

So, why is Cape Breton going nuts over a "game" that is usually considered a minor formality in a tarabish game? Great question, hypothetical friend I'm pretending to have a conversation with! But seriously, this is a game invented for people lacking the attention span for Bingo, and too impatient to watch all the lottery balls to drop. You could teach a turtle with head trauma how to play Chase the Ace. It's not so much a "game" as it is a basic motor skills assessment for people who recently came out of a coma. What was the question again? Oh, right. Money. That's what people are excited about. A giant pile of colorful Canadian cash.

Canadian cash beds are way more colorful, because we're FABULOUS!

The pot for whoever draws the Ace is up to an estimated $600,000 on Saturday, and there's only 8 cards left. Oh, I forgot to mention that part. When someone pulls a card that isn't the Ace, not only do their hopes and dreams shatter, but the card is destroyed in what I can only assume to be some sort of cultish ritual with robes and fire (and probably pentagrams). This has happened 44 times in a row, which is why the pot has grown past love-seat proportions, and graduated to full on "cash bed" status.

It's time to play...

What Can Rory Buy with $600,000!



17,647 lbs. of dehydrated cereal marshmallows.
42,283 units of nothing.

This yacht in Ukraine, which would finally help me make some friends.

88,495 tubes of live ants.

83,333 slices of inflatable toast.

So, never let me borrow money. It won't end well. But as amazing as $600,000 sounds, it's only a fraction of how much has been raised by this round of Chase the Ace. That number only accounts for 30% of all ticket sales, while 20% goes to the person whose ticket is drawn, which was Mary Margaret MacIntyre and John Glogowski last weekend, who took home $79,252. On a side note, if you're having trouble paying your bills this month, don't hit up Mary Margaret. Not cool, man. Poor form.

Maybe if you stopped blowing all your cash on hair gel, you wouldn't have to ask Mary Margaret for help.

Ok, just to clear things up a bit, I'm not against homeless people. I'm just against homeless people with better hair than me. Actually, that's a perfect segway to my next point. We've only accounted for 50% of the money, so where does the other mattress of monetary dreams go? Well the Inverness legion thought it would be uncouth if they suddenly installed olympic sized hottubs and a gold plated parking lot, so they teamed up with the Inverness Cottage Workshop to put Cape Breton's insatiable gambling habit to good use. They provide training and life skills to intellectually disabled people, so when you're buying your tickets and dreaming of how you're going to rub it in everyone's faces when you win and buy your own island and then take selfies with your new pet monkey, you can also pat yourself on your back for doing the world a solid favor. 

So how much has the combined efforts of Cape Breton's shattered dreams raised for the Inverness Cottage Workshop? Let's run the numbers!

30% in the pot = $600,000

20% given away to ticket holders = $400,000

50% to charity = $1,000,000

Well that's a nice round number. It nearly doubled the size of the money bed!

Whoops. I just doubled the number of dudes. Sorry about that. 

And what can Inverness Cottage Workshop buy with $1,000,000? Well, 138,889 slices of inflatable toast, of course! Ugh, this is why I'm poor.

The next Chase the Ace draw will happen this Saturday, with tickets on sale from 2-5 p.m. at the Inverness legion and the community arena, and if the Ace isn't drawn, God help us all.