People line up to buy Powerball lottery tickets at Bluebird Liquor in Hawthorne, Los Angeles, Califo …
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The lottery jackpot is at its greatest ever – an estimated $1.4 billion – after nobody picked the winning numbers for Saturday’s drawing.
If there’s no victor in Wednesday’s drawing, the pot will continue to climb into unheard of amounts.
The payout has increased due to strong ticket sales on Monday, said Texas Lottery Commission spokeswoman Kelly Cripe.
Officials said there have been two Powerball jackpot wins in Maryland since the game came to the state in 2010. In shorter periods, oddities can occur, in the same way someone could flip a coin and get heads five times in a row.
The ticket numbers matched the first five drawn Saturday night but didn’t match the Powerball number.
The victor can choose to be paid the full jackpot in annual installments over 29 years – or take a one-off cash payment of $930m – before taxes.
For those curious about your chances of winning, picture this: it’s about one in 292.2 million. The best times to purchase a ticket, according to the lottery, are before 10:00 a.m. and after 7:00 p.m.
According to Florida Lottery’s website, flalottery.com, Florida is among the top-selling Powerball states, exceeding more than $3.2 billion in sales, yielding $1.3 billion in education funding since it launched here in January 2009. It hit the billion dollar mark about a week after that.
At Union Wine & Liquors, Romero said he got to the store at 8:35 a.m. Tuesday, and by 9 a.m. he had sold $1,000 worth of Powerball tickets.
Forty-four US states take part in the Powerball along with the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands.
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But Powerball issues partial winnings to people who have at least some matching numbers.
