The Powerball site gives players access to the latest winning numbers and drawings for the POWERBALL lottery game. The site also offers an instant jackpot calculator that allows players to see their odds of hitting the jackpot.
To play, players must purchase a ticket for $2 from a participating Lottery retailer in their home state or jurisdiction. They can then choose five numbers from a pool of 69 white balls and one red number from 26 red Powerballs. The Powerball game is played in 45 states and the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands, although the five states that do not participate in the game are Alabama, Alaska, Hawaii, Nevada and Utah.
A lucky player will win the jackpot prize if they match all five numbers and the Powerball number drawn in the drawing, which is held every Monday, Wednesday and Saturday at 10:59 PM ET. The jackpot will continue to grow until it is won. If a winner opts to take an annuity, the payout is estimated at $1.9 billion over 29 years.
In a Powerball drawing, the white balls are drawn from two separate machines and the red Powerballs are drawn from another machine. If a player matches all five white balls and the Powerball, they will win the jackpot prize. The odds of winning are slim — 1 in 292.2 million.
But that hasn’t stopped lottery organizers from making the game harder and harder to win. Victor Matheson, an economics professor at the College of the Holy Cross who studies lotteries, told CNBC Make It that Powerball’s odds of hitting the jackpot have gotten worse in recent years as organizers try to juice sales and attract more players.
While the odds of hitting a single jackpot have dropped from 1 in 288 million to 1 in 292.2 million, it doesn’t mean that you can’t win more than once. That’s because the jackpot money rolls over into the next draw, incentivizing players to buy more tickets.
For example, in January 2016, three winners split a Powerball jackpot worth $1.586 billion. The winning ticket was sold in Maine, which had not previously had a Mega Millions jackpot winner.
Organizers of Powerball have gradually made the game harder to win since the mid-1990s, says Matheson. For instance, in 2015, they added more number combinations to nearly halve the odds of hitting the jackpot. But, Matheson explains, those changes don’t necessarily improve your chances of winning the jackpot or any other top prize.
Instead, you may increase your odds of winning lower-tier prizes by using the optional feature called “Power Play.” It costs an additional $1 per play. With Power Play, you can double the Match 5 prize or multiply non-jackpot prizes by 2, 3, 4, 5, and 10 times.
In addition, you can also increase your odds of winning by matching the winning numbers and adding the optional POWERBALL feature to your Powerball play slip. POWERBALL also has a DRAWING GUEST option that lets you select up to four guest numbers for your ticket and increases your odds of winning a second prize by 50 percent. 파워볼사이트추천