As long as I'm dreaming anyway, I might as well dream big, right? What's the largest online jackpot ever hit? What's the biggest progressive casino jackpot ever hit? And what's the largest lottery jackpot ever hit?
The largest online jackpot was hit not too long ago. In February, a Michigan internet slot player on a DraftKings site bet 20 cents and hit a $9.28 million jackpot. The lucky player bet some spare change on an Irish Pot Luck game with a progressive that resets at $1 million and had been growing for almost exactly a year. The player beat the previous online-jackpot record, set in August 2024, by a player from New Jersey who won $6.4 million.
The largest brick-and-mortar slot jackpot in history was hit on a dollar Megabucks machine in April 2003 at Excalibur for $39,710,826. It was hit by a 25-year-old software engineer from Los Angeles, in town to watch the NCAA basketball tournament. The man opted to remain anonymous, but it was reported that his birth date contained three 7s and an 11. Unlike most major jackpot winners, he didn't take the lump sum, receiving a little less than $1.6 million a year for 25 years before taxes; his last payment is three years from now, 2028.
And the largest lottery jackpot in history was a cool $2.04 billion, on a Powerball ticket hit in California on November 7, 2022. The ticket was sold at Joe’s Service Center in Altadena, Calif., just north of Pasadena, and the winner claimed the prize on Valentine's Day 2023. His name is Edwin Castro and he lived at the time in Altadena. Two weeks later, he bought a 13,500-square-foot mansion in the Hollywood Hills for $25.5 million. He could certainly afford it; opting for the lump sum of just under a billion, after taxes Castro wound up with roughly $630 million.
