He Came Home From New York and Found $1 Million Sitting on His Table

George Boston of Warrenton bought a $2 Powerball ticket at Tobacco Plus on East Macon Street, then left North Carolina for a trip to New York. While he was away, the North Carolina Education Lottery announced that a ticket sold in Warrenton had matched all five white balls in Saturday night's drawing and was worth $1 million. Warrenton is not a big place. The news was waiting for him when he got back. "When I came back, I heard that there was a winner in Warrenton," he said. "I looked at my ticket on the table and went, 'Oh wow, I got a match.'"

His first instinct was to tell his family, and his family was unreachable. He rang his wife. He rang his children. Nothing. When his daughter finally called back, he skipped the greeting entirely. "I'm a winner! I'm a winner!" is how he opened. It is the kind of detail that only happens in real winner stories - the biggest news of a lifetime, held for an hour because everyone was busy.

The ticket matched the numbers on all five white balls but not the Powerball, landing the game's second-tier $1 million prize. The lottery puts the odds of matching all five white balls at 1 in 11.6 million; the jackpot itself, which was rolling towards $633 million by the following Monday, runs at 1 in 292 million. The same Saturday drawing produced a second big North Carolina ticket: a $200,000 Power Play win bought at the Speedway on North Brightleaf Boulevard in Smithfield, in Johnston County.

Boston arrived at lottery headquarters on the Friday to claim, and after the required federal and state tax withholdings he left with $720,101. That gap between the headline number and the cheque is the part most people forget about a $1 million lottery prize. Winners in North Carolina have 180 days from the drawing to come forward; his ticket spent part of that window sitting on a table while he was several states away.

Powerball drawings are held on Monday, Wednesday and Saturday nights, and tickets are sold across most US states as well as Washington DC, Puerto Rico, the US Virgin Islands and the United Kingdom. Players elsewhere can use a licensed lottery courier, which buys an official ticket on your behalf and holds it securely - five main numbers and one Powerball, the same slip that was waiting on a table in Warrenton.