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Had the lotto ticket not scooped the $40 million jackpot, Brendan King would have been expected to cough up the funds to pay for his entry into the draw.
But when his fellow factory worker Robert Adams discovered the ticket was a winner he determined to exclude Mr King from a $2.7 million share of the prize money.
This is the case put forward by Mr King's lawyer Lachlan Gyles in a NSW Supreme Court battle over whether he should be considered part of a workplace lotto syndicate that struck gold in May.
Mr King, a father of five and production supervisor, argues that he faithfully contributed to a lotto syndicate run by his then colleague Mr Adams at the Liverpool factory where they worked together.
He argues that he believed there was only one lotto syndicate operating at the factory and that all its members would be automatically entered into draws unless they opted out.
During cross examination on Tuesday, it was put to Mr Adams that he had purchased the winning lotto ticket with the intention that the 12 regular members of the syndicate would contribute to the cost.
Mr Gyles put to Mr Adams that he even used funds leftover from his regular contributors to cover the cost of buying the ticket.
But when Mr Adams discovered he had landed the jackpot, he "ringfenced" the syndicate to preserve the pool of money. He told Mr King, the court heard, that the ticket had been purchased by a separate group that comprised all the regular contributors excluding him.
When Mr King asked him why he was not part of the winning syndicate, Mr Adams allegedly said: "Shit happens. I run a lot of lottos."
The court heard that although Mr Adams had a regular process of recording the details of his one-off syndicates on cardboard, he had written the names of the contributors to the winning ticket into an exercise book usually reserved for his regulars.
"One distinguishing feature between this draw and all the others is that you won 40 million," Mr Gyles put to him.
"[Was] the reason you then transferred this [from card to exercise book] after the draw was to seek to establish some formality about the fact that Brendan had been excluded from the syndicate?"
Mr Adams has denied the allegations, and said he had organised hundreds, possibly thousands, of syndicates of which Mr King and other regular contributors were not a part.
He told the hearing that Mr King had been included in another entry into the Powerball draw but "was just not in my mind" when he asked his colleagues to contribute to the purchase of more tickets.
The winning syndicate of 14, Mr Adams said, was a standalone, one-off and he had "never mixed money" between the different lotto groups that he organised.
Mr Adams also denied retrospectively recording a list of the winners in his exercise book, saying he was not sure when or why he recorded their names but it was before the successful draw.
"I don't run every lotto the same way. I don't do every single thing exactly the same as I did last time," Mr Adams told the court.
The court has previously heard that Mr King received about $12 prize money from the ticket of which he was a part.
If he was successful in his court claim, the 14 members of the winning syndicate would have to sacrifice about $200,000 each in prize money.
