Alma Rodriguez was midway through her shift at Ashley’s Lottery Café in Redmond when a customer asked her to choose between two keno tickets. He was winning a little bit and wanted to tip his server, hoping to keep karma on his side and his good luck going.

There was a slip of paper in his left hand, one in his right. In a few minutes, one one them would be worth more than $80,000. The other, nada.

Alma chose wrong.

“We knew right off it was a big winner, but didn’t know how much,” she said. “We put it in the machine and it just said ‘SEE LOTTERY.’ That’s when we knew it was really big.”

They were playing 8-spot, a jackpot game where the payout for going 8-for-8 on keno numbers goes up with each bettor — until someone hits all eight and takes the pot. When the winning numbers were chosen at the Redmond cafe, the pot had reached $80,022.

The winner was a Redmond resident who chose to be identified only as Robert “Bobby” H. According to the Oregon Lottery, he plans to save some of his prize money and use the rest to buy a new truck.

He also recalled giving Rodriguez her choice between the two tickets.

“If she’d picked that one, she would have won,” he told the lottery. “It must have been karma for me.”

Rodriguez sees it as karma, too. She claims she is not pained by coming so close to a big winner. She felt excitement, not regret, even in the first moment when the magnitude of her choice became clear.

“I’d never seen anybody win so much,” she said. “There was no way to not feel happy for him. He was such a nice guy, it was really cool to see him win.”

She says, strongly, that she would have not kept the money if she’d chosen the winning ticket instead of the loser.

“I would have given it back to him and asked him to cut me a share,” she said. “I don’t want to take his money, take his winnings.”

Rodriguez did receive a $100 tip.

Like everyone, she could have used the $80,000. Two nights a week, she works the 8 p.m. to 2:30 a.m. shift at Ashley’s Lottery Cafe, located in a strip mall next to Grocery Outlet. During the week, she works days at BasX Solutions and adds her extra shifts at the late-night gaming spot in order to help pay bills and supplement her savings.

Still, she’d rather wait for her own karma than glom on to someone else’s.

“It was his money. They were his numbers. It was his ticket,” she said. “Someday, I’ll hit my own jackpot.”