The powerball has rolled over and the new estimated cash jackpot is $32M The previous annuity jackpot is $67M. The jackpot reached $28.9M, annuity or 1.3 M more than advertised, meaning they predicted $4.2M less sales than they actually received on the previous drawing. For some reason Powerball seems to be underestimating their prospective sales recently. For the last 3 drawings, sales have been almost constant, within a few tens of thousands of dollars of $14.3M. It seems reasonable to use this figure 14.3M once again to estimate the probabilities of various numbers of winners.
This table gives those rollover probabilities:
0 |
90.68% |
1 |
8.87% |
2 |
0.43% |
3 |
0.01% |
The curve fitting methods I use in MegaMillions don't work very well with Powerball, possibly because there is less data to work with, and also because Powerball has not had a new large run that is completely determined by the events under the new odds structure. (It switched midway during the $340M annuity run.) Also the powerball is comprised of smaller states in general, therefore the same type of regular exponential playing may not apply in these populations. Whatever the case, I can only use the raw data from that last run to estimate the long term probability. For what it's worth, here it is:
Jackpot |
Sales |
Single Draw Rollover |
All Draws Rollover |
$340 |
$165,702,055 |
32.17% |
1.86% |
$300 |
$93,711,624 |
52.66% |
5.78% |
$240 |
$63,285,429 |
64.85% |
10.98% |
$205 |
$50,064,288 |
70.99% |
16.93% |
$180 |
$36,688,866 |
77.79% |
23.85% |
$167 |
$33,384,475 |
79.57% |
30.66% |
$148 |
$27,917,824 |
82.61% |
38.53% |
$126 |
$25,826,780 |
83.80% |
46.64% |
$108 |
$21,843,529 |
86.11% |
55.66% |
$92 |
$19,369,471 |
87.58% |
64.64% |
$80 |
$15,733,224 |
89.79% |
73.80% |
$70 |
$15,751,153 |
89.78% |
82.19% |
$60 |
$12,903,742 |
91.55% |
91.55% |
The sales figures are those taken from www.lottoreport.com There are better than even odds right now, if the run is similar, of exceeding a $100M million annuity jackpot, and about a 17% of exceeding $200M annuity.