A Powerball ticket worth $1 million was sold at a Union City liquor store.
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The one in almost 300 million odds of winning Saturday night’s Powerball drawing aren’t discouraging droves of locals from trying to nab the winning ticket to the lottery’s $800 million jackpot.
“The jackpot typically reaches a level where people who would never anticipate or think about playing say why wouldn’t I just spend $2 and win $700 or $800 million and we’re at that point”, said Arkansas Lottery Director, William Bishop Woosley.
News 3 will have those winning numbers Saturday night at 11 p.m. Eastern.
For this weekend’s record drawing, about 65 percent of the possible number combinations will have been bought, officials with the Multi-State Lottery Association, which runs the Powerball game, said Friday.
The Powerball jackpot can be won by matching five white balls drawn out of a drum with 69 balls and one red ball drawn out of a drum with 26 red balls. By making it harder to win a jackpot, the tougher odds made the ever-larger prizes inevitable. The previous record was the $656 million Mega Millions prize paid out in 2012 to players in Kansas, Illinois and Maryland.
Gary Diaz of Lincoln said he’s bought one or two Powerball tickets every week since a group of his co-workers won a lottery jackpot in 2004. The odds are one in 292.2 million. Chrystle Gilbert has been working at Tri-Cities Wholesale Tobacco for about three months and said she’d been selling tickets left and right Friday afternoon, saying she hoped that she’d handed out the winning ticket.
“Almost everyone chooses the lump sum, but you do take a pretty significant hit”, said Mark Luscombe, principal federal tax analyst for Wolters Kluwer Tax & Accounting.
“I went random after Googling all day the best way to play and I found out it doesn’t make much of a difference, so if you don’t have numbers chosen, it’s good to do a Quick Pick”, customer Janet Cruz said.
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First, while many people have opinions, some experts recommend buying multiple tickets. But Wasserstein said he and his colleagues know too well the almost impossible odds to plunk down even $2 for a ticket.
