Spokane man hits $1 million slot jackpot

Tue., July 27, 2004

By Kevin Taylor kevint@spokesman.com

A Spokane man heading for a round of golf at the Coeur d’Alene Tribe’s Circling Raven golf course on Saturday had a little time to kill before his foursome teed off.

He came away with more than a million reasons to be guarding his privacy today.

According to a news release sent out Monday by officials at the Coeur d’Alene Casino, the Spokane golfer plugged about $3 into a Megabucks lottery game while waiting for his golf time and hit the jackpot with a payoff of $1,070,824 on Saturday.

The payout was more than four times bigger than the previous high jackpot of $230,000 for the Megabucks game, casino public relations director Bob Bostwick said.

“I am told he remained pretty calm. He actually went out and played his round of golf,” Bostwick said of the winner, who expressed a desire to remain anonymous.

The machine where the lucky $3 turned into more than a million froze, as it is designed to do, after the jackpot. Casino officials spent the next six hours guarding the machine until a team from Internet Gaming Technologies, which runs the Megabucks game, could fly up from Boise to verify the win.

“And they did,” Bostwick said. IGT, based in Rapid City, S.D., contracts with about 150 tribal casinos around America to run Megabucks and other lottery-style games. The game is similar in concept to the state-run Powerball lottery, where the large number of gaming sites allows the jackpot to grow quickly.

The jackpot is the largest in Idaho or Washington casino history, Bostwick said, and is paid by IGT. Casinos that contract to install the game do so for a percentage of the take.

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