It's been a wild month for the Kinsmen Club of Winnipeg.

With a $640,000 bingo jackpot on the line — the highest-ever prize for the club's weekly televised game — some Manitobans went to extreme lengths to get their hands on as many cards as possible ahead of the next game.

And on Saturday, one lucky player finally won the jackpot.

Though the club can't officially declare a winner until Monday at noon because of its lottery licence, bingo chairman Raj Phangureh confirmed the end of this bingo jackpot.

"I can say that we stopped our game on the 49th ball," he said on Sunday.

"I'm feeling a lot of relief, obviously. There's still a lot of work to do for the next couple of weeks, but hopefully it won't be as busy and crazy and in demand for the next little while until it increases again to a healthy amount."

The Feb. 2 jackpot has been increasing steadily since the jackpot was last given away on May 4, 2019, Phangureh said.

"It's been just record breaking. It's been mind blowing, and it's blown every other sales record out of the water… We've had, you know, some periods where our sales are 10 times normal. And you know even five times our previous records."

80,000 tickets a week

Each game started with a base amount of $10,000 and increases by a dollar for every ticket sold, he said.

Phangureh said this latest game got especially crazy in January, after the club had time to print off more cards for two weeks that month because their show's timeslot was taken over by NFL playoffs.

That meant they sold about 80,000 tickets a week — but once the show was back on, they couldn't keep up with printing that many cards anymore to meet the demand.

"We made some really amazing sales and almost sold out for those two weeks, but then our card supply had to go back down to somewhat normal levels," he said.

"It's like going from an eight-lane highway to a five-lane highway. It just created a huge demand, you know, [a] huge jam and everyone looking for cards all of a sudden."

Phangureh said the unprecedentedly high card sales meant the club raised about $2 million in net sales that will now go to causes within Manitoba. It's a decision he said the club is not taking lightly.

"That is an absolutely incredible amount," he said.

"[With] a huge amount like this, we would have we would feel a lot more responsibility for it and I think we'd be really trying to come up with something special that would ensure the longevity of the money to be used in the future... I think we definitely want to look at something big and new and really special for the province."