By Jane Prendergast
Enquirer staff writer

Helen Thomas, owner of Skywalk Baseball Cards downtown, stays busy Friday at the lottery machine. Enquirer photos by ERNEST COLEMAN

Ronda Gilmore of West Chester buys tickets for a pool of co-workers at Great American Financial Resources.

Never before had the Mega Millions game gotten this big: $290 million.

And tickets were selling as if retirements depended upon it.

Ohio is one of 11 states to play the game, and all over Cincinnati on Friday, bettors were taking their chances at the record-shattering jackpot.

As of 2 p.m., players were spending $558,000 an hour - or $9,300 a minute.

"That's a tremendous amount of money - phenomenal figures," said Mardele Cohen, spokesman for the Ohio Lottery Commission in Cleveland. The drawing was set for 10 p.m.

When jackpots go this high, an interesting phenomenon kicks in, she said - people start playing even if they've never played before.

At Skywalk Baseball Cards on Vine Street downtown, that turned out to be true. Owner Helen Thomas knows her regular customers. There were still plenty of them, buying scratch-offs such as Yankee Doodle Dollars and Lucky Dog Doubler.

But this week, she saw a lot of new faces.

Players ran the gamut: a Rock Bottom Brewery waitress; a man in a Vietnam Veterans for Christ hat; Indians fans in town to watch their team play the Reds.

"This is mild," Thomas said Friday afternoon of the line of customers that stayed steady and stretched nearly to the door.

"When it gets this high, everybody plays," she said. "Everyone's looking for their retirement fund."

She promised every buyer that, if they won the whole thing, she'd rent them a limo to cash in the ticket.

Odds of winning the jackpot?

1 in 135,145,920.

E-mail jprendergast@enquirer.com