Several players pocketed sizable amounts of cash following Wednesday night’s Powerball drawing, but no one managed to nail down all five white ball numbers and the red ball number to win the billion-dollar jackpot prize.
The top prize in the Powerball lottery continues to grow since the last jackpot winner in California took home $1.08 billion on July 19. The current jackpot sits at an estimated $1.4 billion for the next drawing on Saturday, October 7.
However, 10 players won a million dollars or more in the most recent drawing by matching the five white ball numbers. Two winners in Texas and two in Colorado won $1 million each, along with three more winners in Colorado, New York, and Pennsylvania.
Another three players, hailing from Texas, Pennsylvania, and Kentucky, won $2 million each by matching the five white balls and adding the Power Play option.
Another 81 players won 50,000 each by matching four white ball numbers plus the red Powerball number, and 13 others who did the same won $100,000 each with the Power Play option.
All told, 3,260,735 participants in the last Powerball game won prizes ranging from $4 to $2 million.
The estimated jackpot for next Saturday’s drawing will be the third largest in the Powerball game and the fifth largest in the history of U.S. lottery games. The cash value of the $1.4 billion top prize is an estimated $643.7 million before taxes.
This is the first time in the history of Powerball that back-to-back jackpots have hit the billion-dollar mark. However, billion-dollar jackpots have become more frequent since Powerball changed the rules of the game in 2015, lowering the odds of winning from 1 in 175.2 million to 1 in 292.2 million, per CBS News.
The rule change involved increasing the number of white balls in the pool from 59 to 69 and decreasing the number of red balls from 35 to 26. This change made it easier to win the smaller prizes but more difficult to win the jackpot prize.
Powerball, which began in 1992, saw its first billion-dollar jackpot in January 2016 when three ticket-holders split a pot of $1.586 billion. The largest jackpot in Powerball and U.S. lottery history was $2.04 billion, won by a man in California in November 2022.
