Woman in North Carolina beats 1 in 150m odds, wins $2m jackpot

• The North Carolina Education Lottery's PowerMax Cash digital instant game made one Mouth Pleasant woman a millionaire
• The fortunate player scored a jackpot of nearly $2m on a $1 play
• The odds of winning the PowerMax Cash jackpot on a $1 play are 1 in 150m

A fortunate woman, who played a digital instant game for the first time in her life, won a life-changing prize.

That’s the story of one Mount Pleasant woman, who took down the jackpot from the North Carolina Education Lottery’s PowerMax Cash game for a whopping payday.

$1 play brings once-in-a-lifetime jackpot

The winner explained in an interview for the Lottery that she had previously bought some scratch-off tickets.

However, it was the first time she decided to give a digital instant game a try.

The player tapped into the PowerMax Cash game, one of a range of digital instant games available exclusively via the North Carolina Education Lottery’s official mobile app and website, and was shocked to win a multi-million-dollar prize.

With a $1 bet, the Mount Pleasant woman took down the PowerMax Cash game’s jackpot for a significant $1,939,727 payday.

"It started rolling and just kept rolling. I thought it would be like $100 or something," the fortunate woman said, recalling the moment of the win.

Seeing that she scored the jackpot, she immediately told her husband, and he couldn’t believe the win was real initially.

Although the lucky player took down the jackpot on August 1, 2026, she visited the Lottery headquarters earlier this week to claim her windfall.

After the relevant federal and state taxes, the Mount Pleasant jackpot winner collected a sum of $1,396,798.

Asked about her plans for her fortune, the woman said she intends to invest the winnings.

The odds of winning the jackpot were a mind-blowing 1 in 150m

What makes the jackpot win incredibly exciting are the odds of winning.

The PowerMax Cash offers points per play from $0.50 up to $50.

In this context, the odds of winning the jackpot on a $1 play are the mind-boggling 1 in 150m.

Such a win is extraordinarily rare when compared to the odds of some real-world events that raise eyebrows.

For example, the odds of a woman giving birth naturally to identical quadruplets are estimated between 1 in 15m and 20m, or roughly 10 times more likely to happen in comparison to the 1 in 150m odds.

Another example of a jaw-dropping accident that is more likely to happen when compared to winning such a jackpot is being involved in a commercial airplane accident, with the odds of that happening being 1 in approximately 4.8m flights.

What comes closer to the mind-blowing odds of 1 in 150m are the odds of flipping a coin with heads for 27 consecutive times, with the odds of that happening being 1 in 134.2m.

Far greater are the odds of a person being struck by lightning in their lifetime, with the approximate odds of that happening being 1 in nearly 19,000.

Regardless of what the win is compared to, it is certainly a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence.

Image credit: Pixabay.com