Johannesburg - In an uncanny stroke of good luck, following a string of bad luck and a predictive dream, a Pretoria man hit the jackpot and scooped R1.9 million from his R10 Powerball ticket taken at a bookmaker last week.
The 33-year-old father of two boys claimed his prize money two days after the winning numbers had been drawn, in what became popular bookmaker Hollywoodbets’ biggest win.
“We had started sending out appeals for punters to check their tickets for the winning number,” the bookmaker’s betting operations manager, Dermot O’Connell, said on Monday.
He said punters normally collected their winnings straightaway: “We were concerned he had mislaid his ticket or lost it. Our message was for punters to check their tickets, or come in with details of the ticket purchase.”
The winner, who cannot be identified, is a sales clerk and part-time installation technician. He told the bookmaker how he had scraped together the money and bought the winning ticket last Tuesday morning, using numbers revealed to him in a dream.
He told Hollywoodbets his luck had been at its lowest when he bought the ticket, having recently pawned off his R3 000 wedding rings for R500 in desperation. On the night of the dream the man had been sleeping at a customer’s house because he had no means of transport.
“In the dream he apparently overcame a tiger trying to kill him,” said O’Connell. The triumph somehow translated into the winning numbers.
The father told Hollywoodbets how he and his family had been without electricity for the past two months. His landlord had switched the lights off when he failed to pay rent, throwing his 4- and 13-year-olds into confusion over the absence of TV.
O’Connell said this was a classic example of an unexpected win. “One never knows when they will hit the jackpot.”
The Star