How Marcus Won $1,000 (and Almost Stopped Entering a Week Before)
When Marcus Reyes hit submit on the MyPrizeSearch weekly sweepstakes entry form on a Friday morning in March, he’d already decided it was going to be one of his last.
“I’ve been entering various sweeps for about six months,” Marcus told us. “I had a calendar reminder on my phone — ‘enter MPS’ — and I just did it before my morning coffee. But by spring I was kind of over it. I figured the odds weren’t in my favor and I’d give it one more week.”
The following Saturday, the email landed.
“I almost deleted it. You see those subject lines and you assume it’s spam. But something made me open it. I read it three times before I believed it.”
Marcus is 38, a warehouse supervisor at a logistics company in Greenville, South Carolina. He’s not someone who plays the lottery. He doesn’t particularly enjoy gambling. But when he stumbled onto MyPrizeSearch a year ago, the $1,000 drawing struck him as a low-friction thing to add to his routine.
“It’s free, it takes 30 seconds, and if you actually win, $1,000 is real money to my family,” he said.
The almost-stopped moment
Marcus is candid that he came close to giving up. By March, he’d been entering daily for nearly six months with nothing to show for it.
“I started doubting whether the drawing was even real, honestly. I’m not proud of that. But you sit there entering every day and nothing happens, and at some point your brain just goes — this is a thing you do because you’re stubborn, not because it makes sense.”
He gave himself a deadline. Friday would be his last entry.
He won on Saturday.
What he did with the money
When the deposit cleared and Marcus knew it was real, he and his wife sat down at the kitchen table.
“We talked about saving it. We talked about paying down a credit card. And then Camila came home from school and mentioned she’d been put on the school orchestra waitlist because she didn’t have a violin.”
The waitlist at her middle school is real — it works on a bring-your-own-instrument basis, and a student-grade violin runs $400-600 used. Marcus and his wife had been planning to save up for one over the summer.
The $1,000 covered the violin, the case, the rosin, and the first six months of lessons.
“She practices in the living room now. It’s not great practice — she’s a beginner — but I love hearing it. Every time I hear her playing, I think about how I almost quit a week before.”
His advice
We asked Marcus what he’d tell someone thinking about giving up.
“Two things. First, set a routine and stop thinking about it. I had a phone reminder. I didn’t agonize over whether I’d win that day. I just did the thing. Second — the moment you decide it’s not worth it is statistically when you’re most likely to win, just because that’s how randomness feels to humans. So just keep going.”
He paused.
“And don’t delete the email.”