A man in North Carolina received a welcome and shocking surprise after he received an email notification; he’d won $2 million in a Powerball drawing.
“I was ecstatic and in disbelief,” the winner, Daryl Steinhoff, told the North Carolina Education Lottery in a statement on Thursday. “I called my daughter and girlfriend.”
Steinhoff said that he used numbers inspired by his family to pick the winning combination for the Monday draw.
The winning numbers were 8, 23, 25, 40 and 53, with a Powerball of 5.
His $3 ticket matched all the numbers except for one. Because he spent an extra dollar on his ticket to double the prize, he won $2 million, according to Raleigh News & Observer.
He was only a single number from hitting the jackpot which was set at $1.2 billion.
According to the lottery, Steinhoff plans to use part of his winnings to buy himself a new home.
Steinhoff lives in Clayton, North Carolina, which is approximately 15 miles southeast from downtown Raleigh.
After taxes, he’s taking home $1.4 million.
The next Powerball drawing is on Saturday and the jackpot is expected to hit $1.8 billion, according to the Powerball website.
If anyone wins Saturday’s draw it would make it the second-largest jackpot in U.S. history. It trails behind the $2.4 billion Powerball jackpot that was won on November 7, 2022, by a player in California.
Hitting the actual jackpot is extremely unlikely. The odds of picking a full slate of matched numbers is 1 in 292,201,338, according to the lottery.
Including the upcoming drawing, only six Powerball jackpots have ever reached more than $1 billion in the game’s 33 years of operation, according to CBS News.
This year, four winners have hit the Powerball jackpot. The most recent jackpot was on May 31 by a player in California.
Powerball’s current 41 draw run ties its record for the most consecutive draws without a jackpot winner. The other streak happened last year, when 42 drawings went by before a player in Oregon won $1.326 billion.
If a single player wins the jackpot on Saturday, they will have the chance to choose either a lump sum of approximately $826.4 million after taxes, or an annuity option that pays out an initial payment followed by 29 annual payments that increase by 5 percent each year.
Tickets for the Powerball can be purchased on the day of the draw but prices will vary by state.
