The Powerball numbers for January 25 are in, and for the ninth consecutive drawing, no one matched all five numbers plus the final Powerball number. That means that Wednesday’s jackpot is currently estimated at $171 million , according to the multi-state Powerball lottery’s own web site.
The total will probably rise as Powerball fever picks up and more people buy tickets, adding to the prize pool.
Even though no one matched the numbers, which were 8, 12, 18, 55 and 57 plus the Powerball number of 2, more than half-a-million people took home at least some sort of cash prize from Saturday’s drawing. Total prize money dished out from the January 25 Powerball numbers drawing comes to about $11.2 million.
Of those 593,440 winners, three were especially lucky. One ticket buyer in Florida and another in Texas matched all five regular numbers, but not the Powerball, each earning a payout of $1 million.
And one person in Arizona who thought to pay the extra dollar to activate the Powerball Power Play option took home $2 million for matching the first five numbers.
The Power Play option comes into effect when a player pays $3 for a ticket instead of the normal $2. That extra dollar doubles the prize money for prizes other than the game’s big jackpot.
The last time anyone won that big jackpot was exactly a month before the January 25 drawing. Because Christmas fell on a Wednesday last year, the Powerball lottery picked its numbers on the holiday itself. And it turned into an extremely merry Christmas for one Kansas City, Missouri man and his wife of 29 years.
Plus, two days after the drawing and one day after learning he was the winner of a $71.5 million payout, Kevin Carlson celebrated his 49th birthday. And then, he quit his job a mechanic. So you could say that he had a good holiday season.
“Now that I don’t work, I plan to use my time to figure out what to do with the money,” Carlson said, quoted in The Kansas City Star .
Powerball is a nationwide lottery with tickets sold in 43 of the 50 states plus Washington D.C. and the U.S. Virgin Islands. The next drawing of Powerball numbers comes Wednesday, January 29 at 10:59 Eastern time. But you must pick your numbers no later than 10 pm, or earlier in some states.
