The Powerball numbers that came up Wednesday night were unlucky for about 13 million people, which means that the Saturday drawing offers a somewhat bigger jackpot of $70 million. After Wednesday’s drawing, which of course produced no big jackpot winner, only one person matched even the first five numbers to claim a $1 million prize.
That single, second-prize Powerball ticket was sold in Portsmouth, Virginia, at Barber Tire and Auto , but the new Virginian millionaire had not announced herself, or himself, by Thursday morning. There’s no rush. The time limit to turn in a winning ticket in Virginia is 180 days.
In further evidence that lottery players are growing jaded to the multimillion dollar, life-altering jackpots offered by the two, nationwide lottery games — Powerball and Mega Millions — ticket sales for Wednesday’s drawing were actually down from the previous drawing this past Saturday, even though the jackpot was $10 million bigger.
Wednesday night’s Powerball game saw 13,232,222 tickets sold for its $60 million jackpot, down more than a million from last Saturday’s 14,407,002 total, which offered “only” $50 million in jackpot winnings.
You’d think the extra $10 million would cause, as it usually does, a rise in ticket sales, not a drop. After all, not too many of us have a spare $10 million lying around these days.
Another possibility is that players have simply come to understand that the odds against winning one of these Powerball or Mega Millions jackpots are so astronomically high, that simply “life-changing” is no longer good enough. They prefer to wait until the jackpot hits truly mind-boggling levels before throwing down a few bucks on the game of chance.
In either case, here was last night’s 175,223,510 to 1 shot combination of Powerball numbers:
14 — 15 — 28 — 37 — 54 Powerball 10
Only 10 tickets nationwide even won so much as the third prize, by matching four of the first five numbers plus the Powerball number . That prize was worth $10,000 to six people, and $20,000 to the two people who activated the Power Play option by paying $3 for a ticket rather than $2.
The two third-prize winners in California where non-jackpot prizes are paid on a pari-mutuel basis won $10,466 for their third-prize Powerball tickets Wednesday.
