Powerball jackpot climbs to world-record $1.5 billion

Since last week, when the jackpot had accrued to over $500 million, Powerball tickets have been reportedly flying off bodega and convenience-store counters.

But that’s not the case.

“Buy 10 tickets in a row of the same game”.

She sells $200 to $400 in Powerball tickets on most days, and more than $1,000 on the days closest to the draw. Tomorrow night’s draw is the 20th Powerball drawing since the jackpot was last won.

For states and their budgets in the tens of billions, the windfall from the Powerball is too small to make a fiscal impact. If you are expecting to win, don’t buy a ticket. “A lot of people in the United Kingdom and all other countries are really going for it”. That’s not a sound investment. (However, the researchers only tracked down people who had won $150,000 or less, and these bankruptcy numbers might change with higher sums.) As for the long term, research regarding an 1832 land lottery in Georgia found that the descendants of those winners did not go on to be wealthier after a few generations. Officials reassess the jackpot estimate daily.No one matched all six Powerball numbers Saturday night, leading to the current enormous prize. Per $2 ticket, that works out to $1.43, plus 32 cents for the lower-tier prizes, minus 70 cents for taxes, totaling $1.05 in expected earnings per ticket. But the point remains: In all the trajectories of the model we’re playing around with, there’s a ballpark 95 percent chance someone wins this. Officials say it’s increasingly likely that someone will win the $900 million Powerball jackpot, which grew by $100 million just hours before Saturday…

Even the cash option is valued at almost $1 billion [$930 million to be exact].

Still, I was eager to find the results of the new model, which recalibrates our estimates based on the Saturday drawing, when the jackpot capped out at $948 million and about 440 million tickets were sold.

Yes, you read that right – that’s more than 292 million.

For example, in the past two years, Missouri and Tennessee have each been home to three Powerball jackpot winners, while NY, the nation’s fourth most populous state, has only had one victor during that span. It also means that your odds of winning some prize are improved, according to their website.

And each state charges state lottery taxes, so if you happen to have bought your ticket in NY, they want their 8.82 per cent cut. With a grand prize of $1.5 billion, the chance of winning as of Tuesday afternoon was 1 in 292,201,338.

In fact, the “unluckiest” lucky victor, CNBC has calculated, may end up with a measly $422.2 million after everyone has taken their piece of the pie.

“People enjoy the opportunity to dream about what they might do if they were rich, which generally fuels a desire to play”, she wrote in an email.

In the late 1970s and ’80s, the sociologist H. Roy Kaplan performed now-classic research on what became of lottery winners. These numbers are often tied to important dates – anniversaries, birthdays, etc.

When people choose their own lottery numbers, they typically pick digits that have some kind of personal meaning for them. “We are well beyond double any previous jackpot amount that we’ve ever had”.