Powerball jackpot increases again to $1.5B on strong sales

New Jerseyans are lining up to buy Powerball tickets, asking themselves what they'd do with the estimated $1.5 billion jackpot that they have nearly no chance of winning the lottery. Matching all five numbers without the Powerball will get you a cool $1 million, at the odds of one in 11.7 million, according to Powerball's website. But there are actually quite a few lotteries that pay off. But in the end, the explanation was far less sinister: those numbers happened to be the "lucky numbers" printed on the fortunes of a popular brand of fortune cookie. "If I want to gamble that day, I'll use the number". These numbers are often tied to important dates - anniversaries, birthdays, etc.

One of the most persistent misconceptions, officials said, is that winners risk tax trouble if they opt for an annuity but die before all 29 payments are made. That self-imposed restriction narrows your selection down to 1 to 31, and excludes 69 other digits from consideration.

The odds of winning the whole thing: one in 292 million.

This, in my opinion, is what's good about lotteries. "There's no doubt it does increase our business, but I was expecting a lot more considering the lines of customers waiting to buy tickets", Dhaliwal said.

Academics have studied this phenomenon. The person at the bottom of the list is worth about $1.7 billion. If there's a low likelihood that a competitor is going to also mobilize a small army of people in a bid to win a historically high lottery jackpot, then perhaps that risk is worth taking.

Still, some limited data is out there.

The Powerball lottery drawing will be held on Wednesday.

That's because there are more people playing, increasing your odds of sharing the jackpot with someone else (or multiple people).

Ticketholders have a 1 in 292.2 million chance of winning the whopping jackpot. Conversely, there were also many many combinations that didn't show up in player tickets at all.

No one has taken home the record-setting Powerball prize yet, but there are already plenty of winners from the 44-state lottery. The state's largest Powerball group win was a $107.5 million cash jackpot shared by 48 transit workers in the Philadelphia area in April, 2012.

Krishna said he doesn't know of any place in his hometown of Ottawa where he can buy a Powerball ticket, but he may suggest that his daughter who lives in Toronto make a drive to the World Class Bakery.

And even those numbers haven't been drawn very often.

Keep in mind this is a highly limited dataset.

Of course, if two or more banks or consortia tried this plan, they would be certain to have to split the pot and thus lose a bunch of money.

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