The Powerball jackpot for Wednesday night’s drawing is at least $1.5 billion, the largest lottery jack…
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Lottery officials said the cities in which the tickets were purchased will be announced Thursday morning.
“The California ticket was sold at a 7-Eleven in Chino Hills, California, lottery spokesman Alex Traverso told The Associated Press”.
Lottery officials don’t yet know whether that winning player or players will have to share the jackpot with other winners.
The 7-Eleven store where the victor bought the ticket will get a $1 million bonus for selling it, Traverso said.
The winning numbers in Wednesday night’s drawing are 4-8-19-27-34 and Powerball 10.
If no winning tickets had been sold on Wednesday the jackpot would have rolled over again, pushing the annuitized prize to an estimated $2 billion, with a cash value of $1.24 billion.
(AP Photo/LM Otero). Traffic moves slowly past a sign advertising the jackpot for the Powerball lottery in downtown Dallas, Wednesday, Jan. 13, 2016.
“We are experiencing technical issues at some of our retail locations”.
The jackpot, which reached record levels after 20 drawings without a victor, was estimated to be almost $1.6 billion.
The $1 million prize is won by matching all five numbers but not the Powerball. Aside from the record jackpot, the lottery says that 26,110,646 tickets won something on Wednesday, though that might be just $4.
If someone matches all the winning numbers, the jackpot would be paid in annual payments over 29 years, or the victor could opt for a lump-sum payment of $930 million.
Powerball is played in 44 states as well as the District of Columbia, U.S. Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico.
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The odds of 1 in 292.2 million are even worse than the 1 in 175 million odds that were in place until last fall, when the Powerball system was changed to build bigger jackpots. Different states close ticket sales and different times, and customers have reported waiting hours in line to nab a Powerball ticket. No one has matched all six Powerball numbers since then, so the prize kept growing.
