That evening, the value of his $15 Powerball ticket went to $2 million when a single string of random digits matched five of the drawn numbers, only missing the final Powerball quantity.
When the $1.5 billion Powerball jackpot was won, lottery fever was so high that 89 percent of all probable combinations had been bought.
The Powerball and Mega Millions games offered a combined jackpot of far more than $1.7 billion in January.
That jackpot was the seventh-biggest in U.S. lottery history and fifth largest in Powerball history.