The current Powerball jackpot is $203M Cash/$305 million annuity as of this writing.
Based on these figures the anticipated sales, according to the Lottery, should be around 102.6M, yielding 56.3 million tickets sold.
The Poisson probability distribution for this number of sales (purely randomized) suggests the following probabilities for this many tickets sold:
k, number of winners |
p(m,k) |
0 |
74.62% |
1 |
21.84% |
2 |
3.20% |
3 |
0.31% |
4 |
0.02%
|
Anything can happen, but this suggests that the most likely outcome would be yet another rollover.
Another set of probabilities can be determined by considering what the last $2 powerball ticket drawing sold, which was the $325M (annuity) jackpot last February, a continuation of a $1 powerball ticket run. This set sold $169.4M tickets. Were this repeated, the distribution of winners would be as follows:
k, number of winners |
p(m,k) |
0 |
61.68% |
1 |
29.81% |
2 |
7.20% |
3 |
1.16% |
4 |
0.14% |
5 |
0.01% |
This also suggests that a rollover is the most probable outcome although, again, anything can happen.