Kelly Cripe with the Texas Lottery, which is part of the Multi-State Lottery Association, says the $1.3 billion figure is the world’s largest – and is likely to get bigger. They correctly picked five numbers and only missed the powerball number to win.
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At a tiny gas station convenience store on Holland Road in Suffolk an official from the Virginia Lottery was posting a sign on the door that someone won $1 million here.
The odds of winning Saturday’s monster jackpot were one in 292.2 million.
Sales for Saturday night’s drawing, in which $949.8 million was at stake, had been robust in the participating 44 states, as well as the District of Columbia, the U.S. Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico.
In Omaha, Les Wheeler said he probably overdid it by buying $30 worth of tickets for Saturday’s drawing with a few friends, but they plan to do the same for this next jackpot.
Officials expect similar sales before the next drawing, but Grief said it’s hard to predict how excitement about the record jackpot will boost sales.
Powerball’s grand prize has increased steadily for weeks after repeated drawings produced no big winners.
There are 292.2 million possible combinations of the five white balls and red Powerball.
“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.
“We urge all our players to check their tickets and, of course, we have plenty of champagne on ice ready to welcome these winners into the National Lottery millionaires club”.
Each lucky United Kingdom victor will receive £33,035,323, scooping their share of the biggest ever jackpot. Then 39.6 percent of your winnings will go to federal taxes, leaving just $486 million – still $98 million short of what you spent to guarantee the winning ticket.
The Powerball jackpot for Wednesday night’s drawing will be $1.3 billion.
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The jackpot has ballooned since its November 4 starting point of United States dollars 40 million and spurred huge ticket sales. Spain’s massively popular Christmas lottery, known as “El Gordo”, is ranked as the world’s richest and last month showered 2.2 billion euros ($2.4 billion) across the country in millions of prizes.
