A Waikato Lotto player is more than $20,000 better off after the weekend’s draw.

A player who bought their ticket at Four Square Te Aroha was one of 15 second division winners in Saturday night’s draw, each picking up $21,952.

A player who bought their ticket at New World Kāpiti also won second division Powerball, taking their winnings to $44,114.

The other second division winners were from Northland, Auckland, Upper Hutt, Blenheim, Christchurch, Timaru, Otago and Wyndham.

Meanwhile, a player from Hastings won $1 million with Lotto first division.

Powerball was not struck and has rolled over to Wednesday night, where the jackpot will be $17 million.

Meanwhile, two South Island Strike players each won $250,000 with Strike Four. The winning Strike tickets were sold at Woolworths Church Corner in Christchurch and Woolworths Greymouth in Greymouth.

The winning numbers for Saturday’s draw No. 2394 were 11 13 15 19 31 38 with Bonus 7 and Powerball 8. Strike was 11 19 15 31.

Last weekend a Waikato player won a share of the first division $1 million prize.

The player, who bought their ticket at Paper Plus Ōtorohanga, was one of three big winners, each taking home $333,333.

Three Waikato MyLotto players, two from Hamilton and one from the wider region, won second division Lotto in last weekend’s draw.

There were 31 second division winners who each won $9800. Two players won second division Powerball, taking their winnings to $20,024.

The previous week two Waikato Lotto outlets sold double winners.

Bin Inn Hamilton East and Praters Four Square in Taupō both sold two second division-winning tickets.

A Waikato MyLotto player was also among the 14 second division winners, each picking up $19,817.

Seven lucky Kiwis took out the top prize in last month’s record $50m Powerball draw.

Other Powerball jackpots won since then include $4.5m won by a MyLotto player in Waikato on June 12 and $5.5m won on June 19 by a physical ticket bought in Waitara.

Those seven winners on June 8 each took home $7.2m in the must-be-won draw.

While two of them had claimed their share of the first prize by the next day on Sunday, June 9, it took until last week for the final winner to come forward and collect their portion of the winnings.

One of the children of the winning couple, who wished to remain anonymous, says the family had a meeting to share the happy news.

“They’ve slowly been doing bits on the house, and now they can afford to finish the renovations,” the child says about the winning parents.

“We really want them to do something for themselves though. They’ve been talking about a special overseas trip for a long time and now they can do that, it will be amazing for them,” says another of the children.

It took the family two weeks to find out they had won first prize.

“Because we don’t buy tickets all the time, we usually only check our tickets when we remember to – we weren’t in a rush,” says the winning man.

A couple of weeks passed, and the man remembered the ticket, which was in his wife’s handbag for safekeeping. He dug it out and scanned it using the MyLotto App.

“The app told me I’d won a major prize and to take the ticket to a Lotto store. I wasn’t sure how much I’d won… but I had a feeling that it was a big amount.”

The man stashed their ticket back in his wife’s handbag so they could check it when they went grocery shopping the next day. Before doing the shopping, they took their winning ticket to the Lotto counter.

“They told us we had won $7 million – we were so excited!” he says.

-Waikato Herald.