Powerball Lottery Jackpot Reaches $500m

No one has matched all six numbers in one of the bi-weekly drawings since the first of November.

The biggest jackpot was a $656 million Mega Millions prize won in 2012.

The prize amount has been going up since the last Powerball victor two months ago and people have been buying up tickets not just in Texas but in 44 states, Washington, D.C., Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands. The jackpot odds stand at 292,000,000 to 1.

The winning white balls were 02-11-47-62-63, with a Powerball of 17 and a Power Play of 3. “Through 5 p.m., players have bought 2.2 million Powerball tickets today, an average of more than 200,000 tickets per hour”. None of those were in Kansas.

The jackpot is the biggest lottery prize in almost a year and the sixth in North American history.?

A Powerball jackpot of $500 million to be announced Wednesday has sparked a surge of ticket sales in the state, according to the Arkansas Scholarship Lottery.

The last time the jackpot got that big, back in February of 2015, the odds of winning were “only” 1 in 175 million.

The chances of winning are one in 293 million.

It may be worth spending some time in the auto, though – a single victor of Wednesday’s jackpot could claim the $500 million prize through annuity payments over the next 29 years or take a lump-sum payout of $306 million.

“Pretty much everyone that comes in here buys a Powerball ticket”.

There actually tend to be more unclaimed prizes associated with a massive drawing like this week’s estimated $500 million prize, he says. But as lottery officials often note, people have no chance of winning if they don’t buy a ticket.