Franklin County residents are spending $2 on Powerball tickets for a chance at winning $1.5-billion and that’s the largest jackpot in history.
Advertisement
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.
The jackpot has been accruing since November 4, 2015, when the last Powerball jackpot was claimed by a victor in Tennessee.
Gary Grief, executive director of the Texas Lottery, responded that Powerball prominently displays both the annuity and cash prize figures. The jackpot estimate is reviewed daily. The new system changed the odds from 1 in 175 million to 1 in 292.2 million.
If you haven’t played yet, now might be the time to give it a shot – a single ticket is only $2.
Plus, if someone else matched the winning numbers, too, you’d have to split the prize.
The increasing Powerball jackpot has more people buying tickets for a chance to win. Officials don’t track which numbers are most popular because so many are randomly generated.
The $1.5 billion jackpot actually pays out $930 million in a lump-sum payment. But 39.6 percent of the lump sum would go to federal income taxes.
Brewer’s ticket was one of 28 nationwide to win the $1 million prize, and the only one in Virginia. The jackpot is so big that billboards around the country have to advertise the prize as $999 million because they’re not built to show… With 440 million tickets sold, there was a little more than a 77% chance that at least one person would have won the Powerball last week, Matheson said. “We’re very concerned about people playing responsibly and not overspending”, Gary Grief said.
Advertisement
Even if you could deploy an army of people to buy all those tickets for you, it’s still extremely unlikely that you’d be able to buy every ticket.
