Man ‘couldn’t sleep all night’ after big Powerball win. Then he made a 4-hour trek
.jpg "Austin Stewart from Blackfoot, Idaho, scored a big Powerball prize after buying a ticket for the Oct. 9 drawing, lottery officials said.")
A lucky lottery player drove across Idaho after scoring a big Powerball prize.
Austin Stewart learned he won $150,000 from the Oct. 9 Powerball drawing after coming home from a deer hunting trip, the Idaho Lottery said in an Oct. 12 news release.
Before realizing the win, the man from Blackfoot said he felt guilty buying a lottery ticket because “finances are pretty tight these days.”
But then he checked his ticket.
“I didn’t believe it. I took it to the store to have them check it, too. They said I had to come to Boise. I couldn’t sleep all night,” Stewart told lottery officials.
He matched four white balls and the red Powerball and was only one number short of the $1.55 billion jackpot.
To score a jackpot in the Powerball, a player must match all five white balls and the red Powerball.
Stewart then got in his vehicle and drove about four hours to Boise to claim his prize.
“This is incredible and just what the family needed,” he told lottery officials.
He has a newborn and plans to use the money on a new roof for his family’s home before winter, lottery officials said.
The jackpot grew to $1.765 billion, and a California player won it during the Oct. 11 drawing.
Blackfoot is about 250 miles east of Boise.
What to know about Powerball
The odds of scoring the jackpot prize are 1 in 292,201,338.
Tickets typically cost $2 and can be bought on the day of the drawing, but sales times vary by state.
However, tickets cost $3 in Idaho and Montana and are bundled with a Power Play, which multiplies non-jackpot prizes by 2, 3, 4, 5 or 10.
Drawings are broadcast Saturdays, Mondays and Wednesdays at 10:59 p.m. ET and can be streamed online.
Powerball is played in 45 states, Washington, D.C., Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands.
This story was originally published October 13, 2023 at 1:36 PM with the headline "Man ‘couldn’t sleep all night’ after big Powerball win. Then he made a 4-hour trek."
