After 3 months with no winner, Powerball pot hits $422M
Time for some lottery dreaming again: The prize in Wednesday night's Powerball drawing has climbed to $422 million, thanks to three months without a winner.
If anyone matches the five balls and red Powerball, it will be the game's first namesake prize winner since May 7 when eight New Jersey family members claimed a jackpot worth $429.6 million. The winning ticket was sold in Trenton.
The big Powerball prize comes less than three weeks after a player in Indiana won a $536 million Mega Millions jackpot.
Wednesday's one-time cash option on the Powerball jackpot is an estimated $291 million. The final jackpot, an annuity paid over 29 years, and cash option will be set just before the 11 p.m. ET drawing and determined by final ticket sales.
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If someone wins, the prize would rank as the nation's 11th largest.
Powerball is played in 44 states, but tickets aren't sold in Alabama, Alaska, Hawaii, Mississippi, Nevada and Utah.
The game already has had a huge year, said Terry Rich, the Iowa Lottery's chief executive officer. The Powerball jackpot reached a world record of nearly $1.6 billion in its Jan. 13 drawing on Jan. 13, growing for more than two months to reach that amount.
The odds of winning any Powerball prize are 1 in about 25. But the odds of winning the dream jackpot are 1 in almost 300 million.
Remember the Leicester City Foxes, that underdog British soccer team that won the Premier League championship in May? Before the season started, bookies put the odds of the team's win at 1 in 5,000.
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Las Vegas bookies put the odds of the Cleveland Browns winning the Super Bowl — they last made the playoffs in 2002 and last won in 1964 — at 1 in 200.
The odds lightning striking you, personally, this year are 1 in 700,000, according to the meteorologists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
The rules for Powerball were changed in the fall, including enlargement of the matrix, to make it harder to match the six numbers drawn and to drive up the jackpot. Five white balls are drawn from one set of 69, and the one red Powerball is picked from another set of 26.
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Powerball drawings take place every Wednesday and Saturday night.
Curious about Mega Millions? The odds of winning are 1 in almost 260 million, but because players won the big drawing on both Friday and July 19 after July 8's big prize, this coming Friday's pot is estimated at $20 million.
Contributing: William Petroski, The Des Moines Register; The Associated Press. Follow Sheldon S. Shafer on Twitter: @sheldonshafer