The jackpot in "America's Game" continues to move, as the game itself moves closer to it's eventual overhaul.
In January the Powerball game matrix will be changed to 59 numbers in the primary ball set (up from 55), and 39 numbers for the Powerball (down from 42).
In the same month, Florida will join the Powerball game, to increase the total number of participating states to 30, plus the District of Columbia and U.S. Virgin Islands.
Saturday evening did not witness the awarding of the grand prize, but 8 lucky tickets matched the five primary numbers to win second prizes of $200,000 cash each. The 8 tickets were sold in Arizona, Iowa, Indiana, Kentucky, Maine, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, and South Dakota.
In addition, 471,565 tickets throughout the Powerball sales territories won a total of $4,899,667.
Because there was no jackpot winner in Saturday's drawing, the jackpot grew to an estimated $81 million, with a cash option for the Wednesday drawing of an estimated $40.5 million.
The numbers drawn Saturday night were 2, 14, 15, 32, 47 and the Powerball was 36. The Power Play multiplier was 3.
Other prizes won Saturday evening included 25 tickets that matched 4 white numbers plus the Powerball, winning $10,000 each. Three additional tickets at this prize level were purchased with the Power Play option that multiplied the winnings by 3 times, for a total prize of $30,000 cash for each ticket.
A total of 87,938 winning Powerball tickets multiplied their prizes by 3 Saturday. Players were able to do that by purchasing the Power Play option for one dollar. With Power Play you multiply your Powerball winnings from 2 to 5 times, except for the jackpot. At the beginning of each drawing a wheel is spun to select that night's multiplier.
Players purchased $22,052,433 in Powerball and Power Play tickets between Thursday and Saturday night.
Powerball drawing results are published within minutes of the drawing at USA Mega (www.usamega.com), as well as on each individual state lottery results page at Lottery Post (www.lotterypost.com/results).
It sure would be nice for it to make it to $300M before the switch to higher odds. Of course, I hope I win it.
Higher odds?-Yikes when is this going to happen? as if thier not high enough already
In January, when Florida joins Powerball. The starting jackpot will be $20,000,000. The odds will increase from 1 in 146,000,000 to 1 in 195,000,000. Have a ball trying to win that jackpot.
Yup, big increase that isn't even reflective of how many potentially new players there will be from Florida joining. They just wanted worse odds than MM so they can easily reclaim the jackpot record.
Do you think it'll make it to over 400 million the first time out or will it take a few months? It's going to be weird how Mega Millions will now have the better odds... Though that's not saying much. Has Mega Millions or the Big Game ever had better odds than Powerball before? I'm sure they have at some point but how long has it been? Hopefully MM will stay away from screwing with either of their matrices for awhile just to compete with the possible PB jackpots.
I'm sure there are people out there who favor even higher astronomical odds just to see an unbelievably high jackpot reached. That's nice but it will only matter to the one or few people who actually win it. For the majority of players it will put winning the jackpot even more out of reach. Even lower prize amounts will be harder to win which makes playing less fun.
Good Luck all!!!!!!
I'd rather wait and win after they change the odds. The average jackpot should be bigger with the new odds, so chances are I'd win a bigger jackpot. $10 or $27 million this week would be nice, but $20 next month or $50 million next year would be even better.
That's the real reason the matrix is changing. Your chances of winning the jackpot are already wildly unrealistic, but you take your chance because it's so damn much money. More money means more people will take the chance, even if it is a smaller chance. Sure, at some point higher odds would actually reduce ticket sales, but MM has already established that that point is somewhere above 176 million to 1.
Well, the average person doesn't look at nor care what the odds are so yeah, when it gets up to those big, attention grabbing jackpot levels everyone is going to want a chance. Just like when Mega Millions got up to 370M last year and sold 212M in tickets which bumped the final jackpot up another 20 million.