3 winners share $1.6-B jackpot
7-Eleven store clerk M. Faroqui celebrates after learning the store sold a winning Powerball ticket on Wednesday, Jan. 13, 2016 in Chino Hills, Calif. Will Lester/The Sun via AP
LOS ANGELES—Three winning tickets shared a $1.6-billion bonanza in the US Powerball lottery on Wednesday, after millions of people tuned in to see the fate of the world-record jackpot live on TV.
The winning numbers were 4, 8, 19, 27 and 34, with 10 as the so-called Powerball number.
Lottery fever gripped the United States, with people forming long lines outside stores to buy a ticket and then frantically checking their $2 slips to see if they had hit the mammoth jackpot.
“It’s official! There were 3 jackpot-winning tickets in tonight’s Powerball draw: California, Florida & Tennessee,” California Lottery tweeted.
The jackpot, which had stood at $1.5 billion for much of the day, eventually crept up to nearly $1.568 billion, according to the North Carolina Education Lottery.
The three winners may choose to divide the full jackpot in annual installments for 29 years, or take a one-off payment of $983.5 million.
Local television showed swarms of people, many cheering and chanting, descending on a convenience store in Chino Hills, a suburb of Los Angeles, where one of the jackpot-winning tickets was sold.
Roaring trade
The odds of winning were at least one in 292 million. Despite that, shops all over the United States did a roaring trade in frenzied last-minute ticket sales in the final hours before the live draw on Wednesday night.
Office workers dashed out between meetings to buy tickets, fantasizing about what they would do with the winnings. Commuters in New York joked about scooping the jackpot to save them from the deep freeze of winter.
For days, the talk of the nation, from coast to coast, and even from Canada to Mexico, was: Will someone finally win the first Powerball in two months and, if you were to win, how would you spend such a whopping jackpot?
“I’m not a regular, but why not? Like the commercial says, ‘Hey, you never know,’” said Nick Friedberg, a carpenter and father of two drinking coffee on a bitterly cold street in Manhattan.
“Nonstop, everyone’s talking about it,” Friedberg said, running through a list of things he would like to buy. “Do the world, that’s for sure.
“I’d love to go to Europe, never been. There are a lot of stuff over there I’d like to see, Italy and all that history. I like all that stuff,” he told Agence France-Presse (AFP).
Record sales
Lottery executives say ticket sales reached record levels, generating more than $1 million an hour in Texas alone in the final buildup to the draw.
Wednesday’s jackpot, which started at $40 million on Nov. 7, was rolled over 19 times, with no one matching all six winning numbers.
“Sales are doing exponentially more than we’ve ever done before,” Gary Grief, chair of the Multi-State Lottery Association’s Powerball committee, told AFP on Tuesday. “I’m hearing anecdotally and through news outlets, millions of people who have never played Powerball before are indeed purchasing a ticket.”
Without a winner, the jackpot would have increased to $2 billion, with a cash value of
$1.24 billion, ahead of Saturday’s drawing, the Texas Lottery Commission said on Twitter.
Winning tickets were sold for dozens of smaller prizes ranging from $50,000 to $2 million in California and other states.
Never in your favor
Among the larger prizes were three tickets worth $1 million each that were purchased in Connecticut and a single ticket worth $2 million that was bought in Iowa. Five tickets, each worth
$1 million, were sold in Michigan.
The odds of winning the jackpot were, to paraphrase “The Hunger Games,” never in your
favor. That was lottery officials’ intention last year when they tweaked the number of balls to choose from to make it easier to win smaller prizes but harder to hit the jackpot.
The average Powerball player had a greater chance of being struck by lightning (the odds of that happening to you in a given year are one in 1.9 million,
according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) than of striking it rich by playing the numbers on Wednesday night.
But statistics is a wet blanket if ever there was one, and millions of Americans kept their hopes alive, shelling out $2 per ticket. Tickets for the lottery were available in all but six states.
Largest jackpot in US
The jackpot on Wednesday was not just the largest in Powerball history, New York State lottery officials said, but also the largest of any lottery game in the United States.
Grief estimated that 85 percent to 95 percent of all the possible combinations were purchased before Wednesday’s draw.
The previous US jackpot record of $656 million, on March 30, 2012, was scooped up by three winners from North Carolina, Puerto Rico and Texas.
The world’s richest lottery is Spain’s annual Christmas “El Gordo,” which in 2015 handed out 2.2 billion euros ($2.4 billion) but which capped individual wins at 400,000 euros ($440,000) and handed out thousands of smaller prizes.
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