The Powerball jackpot will go to one extremely lucky ticket buyer in Florida, as that ticket alone matched all six numbers from Wednesday night’s drawing, making it good for a life-changing $148.8 million top prize — or $87.6 million if the winner chooses to take the payment in one lump sum , as most lottery winners do.
The jackpot was revised down slightly, however, as an advertised $150 million payout apparently wasn’t enough to spar Powerball fever across the nation. Ticket sales for Wednesday’s drawing were actually down somewhat from Saturday’s Powerball game.
There were 18,373,551 Powerball tickets sold for the April 23 Powerball game, down by more than 200,000 from the previous drawing in which the jackpot was “only” $128 million. The slight dip in ticket sales resulted in the top jackpot award also dropping by $200,000.
But the sluggish sales did not stop the Wednesday Powerball lottery from being lucky all around . In addition to the jackpot winner, four tickets matched the first five numbers but not the Powerball number. Three of those, one each in California, Colorado an Maryland, are good for a $1 million cash payout.
But a lone Indiana Powerball player paid the extra dollar — $3 rather than the usual $2 price of a ticket — to activate the game’s Power Play option. The move made that person’s ticket worth $2 million.
The odds of hitting the Powerball jackpot are one in 175,223,510. The chances of winning a “Match 5” second prize are a still-formidable one out of 5,153,633. So considering the relatively modest ticket sales figures, the lottery gods were clearly looking kindly on the Wednesday drawing.
A total of 597,779 winning tickets were sold for the April 23 game. While most of those are good only for the lowest Powerball prize of $4 — or just $3 in California — there were still a total of $9,450,794 in prizes given away in the drawing. And that obviously does not include the jackpot amount.
Your ticket could be one of those winners. Check your Powerball ticket against the following numbers, drawn at 10:59 pm in Tallahassee, Florida.
19 — 25 — 29 — 36 — 48 Powerball 12
It took nine drawings to produce this jackpot winner. The Powerball jackpot now resets to the minimum $40 million. How high can the jackpot reach this time?