Michigan man wins $1M Powerball prize with numbers from unlikely source

(NEXSTAR) – First he grants Tom Hanks’ wish to be big, and now this? Maybe it’s time we stopped underestimating Zoltar.

The Michigan Lottery revealed this week that a man from just north of Detroit won a $1 million Powerball prize after playing the numbers he got from a Zoltar fortune-telling machine.

“About 30 years ago, I was in Las Vegas and got a fortune from a Zoltar machine,” said Stephen Huesgen, from Fraser. “On my fortune, there was a set of lucky numbers, so I have been playing those numbers on lottery games ever since.”

Huesgen, 56, matched the first five numbers from the April 22 Powerball drawing — 24-29-32-49-63 — to earn the game’s $1 million second-tier prize. (The estimated  jackpot for the April 22 drawing was $100 million, though no jackpot-winning tickets were sold.) He told officials he planned to use part of the winnings to pay off his mortgage and his car, with the rest earmarked for vacation and his retirement fund.

Huesgen also mentioned he’ll continue to play his fortuitous lottery numbers in upcoming games, Michigan Lottery spokesperson Jake Harris told Nexstar.

“Players find their lucky numbers in many different ways,” Harris said.

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Huesgen’s Zoltar-aided win marks one of the latest instances of Powerball player using somewhat unconventional means to choose numbers. For instance, a drawing the following week produced 89 second-tier winners, many of whom had simply picked out numbers that aligned in a row on their Powerball scan slips. (The winning numbers for the April 29 drawing aligned perfectly in columns or diagonally, the photos below show.)

A Powerball drawing from 2005 also produced an unprecedented 110 second-tier winners, many of whom soon revealed that they used numbers they found inside fortune cookies from their local Chinese restaurants.

“[M]any players have unique ways of choosing their numbers — and there’s no wrong way to do it,” Iowa Lottery CEO and Powerball official Matt Strawn said after the most recent batch of winners. Strawn warned, though, that all number combinations have the “same probability” of being chosen in any given drawing, “whether players select their own numbers or let the terminal choose them at random.”

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