No jackpot winners for 39 straight drawings means Monday night’s Powerball prize has skyrocketed to $1.1 billion. Yes, you read that correctly.
There hasn’t been a drawing with a grand prize winner since May 31, when a ticket worth $207 million was sold at a convenience store in Arleta. Maybe it’s you.
Ticket sales for Monday’s drawing end at 7 p.m., and the drawing will be conducted at 7:59 p.m. So don’t forget to go to your local (or not-so-local) convenience place to buy your ticket (or tickets).
Keep in mind the odds of matching all five numbers and the Powerball number are 1 in 292.2 million, according to the Multi-State Lottery Association, which conducts the game. The overall chance of winning a prize is 1 in 24.9.
Buying tickets at a store where tickets with large jackpots have been sold in the past will not increase a purchaser’s chance of winning a jackpot, according to USC mathematics professor Ken Alexander.
“The chance that a given place will sell a winning lottery ticket is just related to how many tickets they sell,” Alexander told City News Service.
However, players wanting a better chance of avoiding sharing the jackpot should choose numbers that aren’t selected as often, Alexander said. Lottery players frequently choose the date of their birthdays as one of their numbers, so numbers higher than 31 would be played less, Alexander said.
Monday’s jackpot is the fifth-largest in the history of the Powerball game, which began in 1992. There have been six larger jackpots for the Mega Millions game, which started in 1996 as The Big Game and was renamed Mega Millions in 2002.
The Powerball game is played in 45 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands.
–City News Service contributed to this report.
