Temika Hough was playing digital instants at home on August 9 when a $2 wager on Bison Bonanza turned into a $706,092 jackpot. “Am I looking at this right?” she recalled asking herself in the moment, before later telling lottery officials, “I guess it was my time.”
Hough claimed her prize on Wednesday, according to WBTV, and took home $508,469 after taxes. North Carolina Education Lottery officials said her $2 play became a jackpot of more than $700,000, with odds on the win pegged at 1 in 15.5 million. Hough said the money is a blessing, and plans to use it to pay bills and help her family.
How the Numbers Broke Down
The federal government withheld 24% of Hough's winnings, while North Carolina applied its flat 3.99% state income tax rate for 2026 — a rate reduced from 4.25% in 2025, according to My Lottery Life. Those combined withholdings are what shaped Hough's final lump-sum payout of $508,469.
Bison Bonanza is a digital instant game playable through the lottery's website or mobile app, with wagers ranging from 50 cents to $30 a play. The game's jackpot pool restarted at $50,000 the day Hough claimed her prize and had already climbed back to $95,000 by the following day, per the lottery's report. That reset happens automatically because Bison Bonanza shares its progressive jackpot pool with another digital title, Wheel of Bonuses — a win in either game resets both back to $50,000.
A Second Big Win for the Same Rural County
Hough's jackpot isn't Richmond County's first brush with Bison Bonanza glory. Back in January, another Rockingham resident won a $1.4 million jackpot on the same game with a 50-cent wager and odds of 1 in 62 million. That means two Richmond County players have now landed major progressive jackpots on the identical digital title within about eight months.
The county has also seen wins outside the digital realm. In June, a Richmond County resident turned a $10 scratch-off into $1 million, showing that both paper tickets and mobile play have been paying off locally in recent months. Richmond County is a rural stretch of southern North Carolina where the county seat, Rockingham, has a median household income of $37,224 — about half the statewide average of $72,388 — and a poverty rate of 30.6%, according to Census Bureau estimates cited by Census Reporter.
Digital Instants Reshape the Lottery Landscape
North Carolina's Education Lottery launched digital instant games in November 2023, and the online catalog has since ballooned from eight titles at launch to 80 distinct games as of this month. The format generated more than $1 billion in online ticket sales within its first few months, according to Betting USA.
These online games return roughly 87% of wagers to players, far higher than the roughly 50% return rate on traditional draw games like Powerball and Mega Millions, per the Carolina Journal. That higher payout rate has fueled a debate over school funding: a late-2025 state audit found that even as total lottery sales surged from $5.4 billion to $6.6 billion — driven largely by digital games — net revenue transferred to the state's Education Lottery Fund actually slipped slightly, from $1.07 billion to $1.05 billion.
Hough's $706,092 prize still falls well short of the state's largest digital instant payout on record: a New Bern resident won $6,745,117 on a $2 Monopoly play in April 2025. Still, for a county where median incomes trail the state by tens of thousands of dollars, a $2 bet turning into more than half a million dollars after taxes is the kind of story that resonates well beyond Rockingham's borders.
