Lottery Round-Up | All The Latest Lucky Numbers

The US Powerball draw is nearing the weekend draw and players will be dreaming of bagging the enormous €62,000,000 jackpot on offer. One man in particular knows exactly how it feels to be on the winning end of just such a windfall.

Brad Duke was a regular lottery player who dreamed about what it might be like to win thousands of dollars. Duke won one of the biggest lottery jackpots in history when he took home the Powerball's $220 million grand prize in 2005. Where many people would have been already on their luxurious holidays, a couple of weeks later Brad had still not come to terms with his win. For weeks he kept quiet about his windfall and continued his life as though he had never won.

"I stayed in my house, I drove a used car for up to three years afterwards," he said. "The more I started to fantasize about what I could do with the money, the more I felt like I should try to keep my feet on the ground and change as little as I could."

Duke went on to explain the peculiar reactions of the clerk at the fuel station when she realised that he had a huge payout coming his way. "I had the ticket in a visor of a rental car at the time, and I had to stop and get fuel. I thought it would be a good time to check the tickets. So, I took the ticket in, let the gals behind the counter run the ticket through. And she made a bunch of weird noises and they started jumping up and down and jumping in circles, and I was trying to actually pluck the ticket out of their hand 'cause my first instinct was just to kind of get out of there."

"I thought maybe that I had won 10 or 20 thousand, but I didn't confirm it. I went on with my day just daydreaming of what I could do with five, 10, 15, 20 thousand, whatever it may be."

Weeks later, Brad was still struggling to come to terms of his win. "I knew the first thing that I wanted to do was decide what I wanted to do with the money and where I wanted to go with this whole thing. So I didn't tell anybody. I kept working. I continued with my daily routines."

Although he kept quiet about his new riches, he did tell his dad. "I made one phone call to my father and I told him - it's a funny story - I said, dad, sit down and prepare for some life-changing news. And he says, oh, you're getting married. And I said nope. And he goes, well, then you're the guy that won the lottery."

Today, Brad remains pragmatic and takes care not to fall into the trap that so many winners before him have fallen into. "I knew the statistics. I knew six out of 10 people that won 10 million or less were bankrupt in less than five years. I knew the statistic and that's one thing that I really wanted to not become. The biggest piece of advice I can give somebody that gets put into that, you really have to define what's important to you, and develop a plan around it and then get people to help you do what you're not so good at doing as part of that plan."

Lottery Round-up