An eastern Iowa man has just claimed the biggest prize yet in one of our InstaPlay games!
William Bowling of Maquoketa claimed a jackpot prize of $303,675 this week in the Extreme Green Progressive InstaPlay game. That’s the largest prize ever won in an InstaPlay game since the product debuted in Iowa back in 2016.
The previous record InstaPlay jackpot also was in the Extreme Green Progressive game. That prize of $276,296 was won in October 2020 by a Hiawatha man.
As he claimed his prize Tuesday, William was looking to the future. He’s 64 and said he’s been thinking about retiring at the end of the year, and his big win would make that a lot easier if he decides to do that.
William bought his winning ticket at his local Casey’s, where he stopped after work to redeem a $20 prize from another ticket. He said he noticed that the jackpot was still climbing in Extreme Green, so he decided to use his initial prize to buy another ticket. He said he took the ticket out to his truck and that’s when he noticed he’d won big!
But William said he didn’t trust what he was seeing – he kept thinking he’d wake up and it wouldn’t be real. So he called his wife, Deb, and had her check the ticket, too. He said she scanned the ticket with the lottery’s mobile app to verify the prize involved, and then they were both in shock.
If you’re not familiar with progressive games, they’re called that because their jackpots grow progressively larger with each ticket sold statewide until the big prize is won. In the case of Extreme Green Progressive, its jackpot starts at $20,000 and grows from there, increasing by $2 with each ticket sold statewide in the game.
An electronic file of plays exists in the game, and winning tickets are randomly distributed throughout that file. The exact amount of the jackpot won depends upon where the jackpot-winning ticket exists in the electronic file, and when the ticket is purchased.
Some jackpots won in a progressive game will be larger, based upon where that particular jackpot-winning ticket falls within the game, and some will be smaller, for the same reason. As a security feature, not even those of us who work at the lottery know where the winning tickets are within our games, so no one can predict when or where the next big winner will hit.
The jackpot that William won obviously had been growing for a while and his ticket won a big prize because of that! In addition to thinking about retirement, William said he’s considering using part of his winnings to go on a family vacation somewhere warm.
With today’s single-digit temperatures here in Iowa, that sounds like a perfect plan!
