Rockey Subba had never bought a raffle ticket before. The 29-year-old, who works in a transport department and has lived in Dubai for six years, put in with five friends on a single Big Ticket entry and picked the number off his own birthday. It came up in the last weekly e-draw of September, worth Dh25,000.
His first reaction was disbelief. "At first I didn't believe it," he said, assuming someone had made a mistake. "When I went on and actually saw my name there, I realised it was true. I was so happy."
Because the ticket was shared six ways, the money splits six ways too — roughly Dh4,000 each. Subba says he will "do a little shopping and enjoy the win," and is now eyeing the bigger prize: "Now I'm hoping to win the grand prize."
He was one of four Dh25,000 winners in the same round, which paid out Dh100,000 in total. Another was Kunal Pillai, an Indian IT engineer based in Abu Dhabi, whose win landed close to his birthday. A Pakistani driver who also took Dh25,000 said he intends to put the money towards starting his own business.
The weekly e-draw is the smaller, more frequent side of Big Ticket Abu Dhabi, running alongside the separate headline monthly draw. Group buying of the kind Subba describes is common practice across the UAE: colleagues, flatmates and site crews pool for one ticket and agree in advance how any prize gets divided. It keeps the individual outlay low, and in this case it turned a first-time Dh4,000 punt — split among six people who had nothing to lose — into the week's best story in the office.