A 64-year-old Pakistani national has won the Dh15 million grand prize in Abu Dhabi’s Big Ticket Series 290 live draw, a jackpot worth roughly Rs1.14 billion, after purchasing lottery tickets for the same draw regularly for the past 15 years without success.

Shaukat Aftab, based in Pakistan, held winning ticket number 245556, which was drawn during Thursday’s live event by Reynaldo Herboso, a winner from the Philippines in last month’s edition of the draw. Big Ticket organisers contacted Aftab by phone in Pakistan to inform him of the result, but he initially assumed the call was a scam and did not believe what he was being told. Officials then asked him to independently verify the winning ticket number through Big Ticket’s official website, and it was only after checking those details, and later watching a recording of the live draw on YouTube, that Aftab became convinced the win was genuine. “Oh my God! Thank you very much. Love you. So grateful and very happy to know,” he told organisers once the reality of the result had sunk in.

Aftab’s win adds another name to a growing list of Pakistani nationals who have claimed major prizes through Big Ticket, one of the longest-running raffle draws in the Gulf. Established at Abu Dhabi International Airport in 1992 with an original cash prize of one million dirhams, the draw has grown considerably over more than three decades, now regularly offering multi-million dirham jackpots alongside luxury car prizes in its accompanying Dream Car draw. Big Ticket holds its main draw on the third day of every month, with additional weekly draws held throughout the month offering smaller cash prizes to a separate set of winners.

What sets Aftab’s win apart from many previous jackpot stories associated with the draw is the sheer duration of his participation. According to organisers, he had been purchasing tickets for the same draw consistently for 15 years before finally securing the top prize, a detail that has resonated widely given how many participants in raffle-style draws tend to buy only sporadically. His win follows a broader pattern of major prizes going to Pakistani nationals in recent Big Ticket editions, including an earlier draw in which Abu Dhabi-based Pakistani expat Rashid Manzer Ahmed won Dh12 million after his ticket number was selected.

Thursday’s draw was not limited to a single major winner. Alongside Aftab’s Dh15 million grand prize, four participants from India and one from Bangladesh each won Dh100,000 in the same draw, part of the tiered prize structure Big Ticket typically runs alongside its headline jackpot. Expatriate and overseas participants from South Asia have long made up a significant share of Big Ticket’s player base and its list of major winners, a pattern that continued with this month’s results.

For Big Ticket, now well into its fourth decade of operation, this latest jackpot continues a run of headline-grabbing wins that has helped sustain the draw’s popularity across the Gulf and among the region’s large South Asian expatriate and diaspora communities. Organisers have pointed to the transparency of the live draw format, and the fact that winners receive their full prize amount without deductions, as central to the draw’s enduring appeal even as lottery and raffle-style products have proliferated across the region in recent years.

With the September draw now concluded, attention turns to Big Ticket’s next edition, where a fresh jackpot will once again be up for grabs, continuing a monthly cycle that has, for a growing number of long-time ticket holders like Aftab, occasionally turned into a genuinely life-changing result after years of routine, low-odds participation.

Compiled by the Weekly PK World Desk.