The Missouri Lottery says sales for Saturday’s Powerball drawing surpassed all previous records with over $15.8 million in tickets sold.
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The prize has now grown to $1.3 billion, which is the world’s largest jackpot.
Saturday’s winning numbers were 16, 19, 32, 34 and 57, with a Powerball number of 13.
Here’s the theory: At $2 a ticket and 1 in 292 million odds, you could seemingly buy every Powerball combination for “just” $584 million – and still walk away with a massive profit.
All it would take is one other victor to make your $584 million investment unprofitable. And that is all but certain to grow before the next drawing Wednesday, according to lottery officials.
“We encourage people to make sure they have good clean documentation, who owns all of the tickets in the office pool and how the proceeds will be shared”, he said. “It shows you how hard it is to win”. California and Pennsylvania exempt lottery winnings from income taxes if the ticket was bought in-state.
This, said Everett, is believed by lottery officials to be a world-record jackpot.
The logo for the multi-state lottery Powerball.
That’s a grand total of $1.2 billion in winnings, $576 million of which would be profit.
This reality was underscored by research I undertook with Emily Haisley and Romel Mostafa (both then graduate students at Carnegie Mellon University), in which we studied how feelings of poverty affect lottery ticket purchases. “It depends”, he tells AFP as customers bustle in and out of his bodega to sign up for their lucky numbers – few content with buying just one ticket. You’ll get some money in smaller prizes for matching two, three, four and five of the winning numbers, but you still won’t come out ahead.
One person who bought a ticket, Anndrea Smith of Omaha, 30, said on Saturday she had spent more than she usually does on Powerball tickets. More than 72,000 residents cashed in for $436,000 during Saturday’s drawing alone. “It only takes one ticket to win”.
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However, it’s true that as jackpots increase, more people typically play the game.
