The grand prize in Saturday’s drawing was worth $558 million for a victor choosing an immediate cash payout instead of annual payments over 29 years, according to lottery officials in California, one of the participating states.
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Sonja Peterson of Minneapolis said she never buys Powerball tickets, but on Saturday, she bought two with random numbers at Bobby & Steve’s Auto World gas station – one for her, one for her boyfriend.
While you wait to see if the jackpot will increase or if someone is celebrating a big win, here is a list of the top five Powerball lottery jackpots given away previous to Saturday night’s $949 million jackpot.
This kind of huge jackpot was just what lottery officials hoped for last fall when they changed the odds of matching all the Powerball numbers, from about one in 175 million to one in 292.2 million.
Dony Elias, 26, an attendant at Stardust Liquor in Los Angeles, said 300 customers picked up tickets for Powerball on Friday night at his store. “Let’s buy some tickets today'”. By making it harder to win a jackpot, the tougher odds made the ever-larger prizes inevitable.
“I’m not greedy”, he said.
“Every once and awhile, I’ll come in and get a ticket or something”. Hundreds of thousands of people have been sending out tweets about their losing tickets and are anxious to find out if the jackpot will continue to rise for the next drawing on January 13.
The unidentified person bought the winning ticket for Friday’s Mega Millions drawing at the Willowbrook Deli on Staten Island. But Wasserstein said he and his colleagues know too well the almost impossible odds to plunk down even $2 for a ticket. He’ll take a break if he wins.
Lonny Jamison, who came in to buy a few tickets, wouldn’t stop working, either.
Jamison is a certified school bus instructor, but he also plays the drums for a gospel band whose bus burned. “And they have children, so give them a minivan”, Jamison said.
“The number’s very high”, Peterson said. There’s a much higher chance of winning a $1 million prize at 1 in 11,688,053.
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“Picking one lucky penny out of a stack of pennies the height of the Empire State Building, would still be 1,000 times more likely” than winning the Powerball, he said.
