The big prizes for the Powerball and Mega Millions just keep growing. Tuesday went without a Mega Millions winner, but tonight there is a chance for Powerball players to strike a big payday.
That big payday amounts to $550 million or a lump-sum payment of $411.4 million. If it hits, it will be the ninth-biggest Powerball jackpot in the game’s 28-year history.
Winning Powerball numbers for Jan. 13
Here are the winning numbers for Wednesday’s Powerball drawing:
Numbers: 4-19-23-25-49
Powerball: 14
Power Play: 2
Two lottery jackpots offering up around $1.3 billion
Now $550 million is big enough in its own right, but it is tough right now to talk about Powerball without talking about Mega Millions and vice versa. With the two lotto draw games each generating some of the biggest prize pools in the history of the game, the interest in one spurs the interest in the other.
The last time the Powerball jackpot hit was on Sept. 16, 2020. The winner of that drawing did hail from New York. They netted a $94.8 million jackpot. It came a day after the last Mega Millions jackpot hit on Sept. 15 for $120 million.
Amazingly, the combined total of the two jackpots still doesn’t eclipse the biggest lottery jackpot in history. That one was actually won on this date four years ago. However, no solo winner took home the nearly $1.6 billion jackpot. Instead three separate winners split the winnings up.
The biggest solo winner in US lottery history was the South Carolina player who won the $1.53 billion Mega Millions jackpot in October 2018.
Odds of winning Powerball
Let’s be clear: Your chances of winning the Powerball jackpot are not great. Players have a whopping one in 292,201,338 chance of matching all five white numbers and the red Powerball.
You might think that because more people are playing, a winner becomes inevitable. Really though, no matter how many people buy tickets, your chance of buying the winner does not change. You can certainly buy more than one ticket to increase the possibility you hit winning numbers, but even that cannot compensate for the fact it is wildly unlikely you will match all the winning numbers.