A homeless man beat over three million people in a fantasy American football league despite not even owning a computer.
Nathan Harrington, a 33-year-old from Salem, Massachusetts had a run of bad luck after a car accident in 2009 left him with nerve damage and unable to work.
He was then forced to leave the apartment he shared with his fiancée and their three-year-old son because the building was so infested with rats it became uninhabitable.
His computer was put in storage as he was forced to live in cheap motels, but his fantasy team on ESPN's website kept picking up points and ended up beating 3.1 million people to become the best scoring team in the country.
Harrington's prize for winning? A $3,500 gift certificate for a consumer electronics store, which he is selling to his mother for $2,500. He's going to use the cash to help move his family into a new apartment.
"My fantasy football was the one thing that kind of seemed to be going right at the time," Harrington told the Salem News.
"There was a lot to be upset about, but the one thing that was steady and heading in a positive direction was the fantasy football. So I thought I might as well stick with it and ride it out. Thank God I did."
Fantasy American football is even more complex than the regular fantasy football people in Britain might be familiar with, as it involves drafts, the picking up of free agents, and constant team tweaking. Players can spend hours in front of their computers researching their teams.
With no computer, Harrington had to improvise.
He knocked on strangers' doors at his motel to ask if he could use their computer. He used the computer at a nursing home where his father was staying; he went to his mother's house, and once he even made his fiancée pull over at the library so he could use their computer.
"She laughs about it now. But there were times when she was really mad at me," Harrington said.
"Now though she says she's never going to say a word about fantasy football when I'm on the computer again."