Powerball will tie a record for lottery drawings on Saturday evening with a stretch of more than three months without a jackpot winner.
It’s that string of futility that has allowed Powerball’s top prize to reach $1.23 billion, the eighth-largest prize in U.S. lottery history. And it’s a sign that the game works exactly as intended, with big odds creating a huge jackpot that entices people to put $2 on a ticket.
It means that no one should ever expect to match all six numbers and become rich, although chances are good that someone will eventually do so.
The last time anyone won the Powerball jackpot was on New Year’s Day, when a player in Michigan won an $842.4 million jackpot.
Since then there have been 40 consecutive draws without a jackpot winner. The 41st on Saturday evening will equal the record for most draws, previously set twice in 2022 and 2021.
The winless streak is no fluke. Lottery officials set the odds at 1 in 292.2 million in hopes that the jackpots in each of the three weekly drawings will roll over until the top prize becomes so huge that more people notice and play.
The odds used to be significantly better, at 1 in 175 million, but in 2015 they were made more difficult to create the massive jackpots. Lottery officials at the time also made it easier to win smaller prizes, noting that the overall odds of winning anything are about 1 in 25.
It’s hard to imagine what a 1 in 292.2 million chance means.
One way is to think of the approximately 322 million people who live in places where they can buy Powerball tickets — five states don’t participate. If each person bought one ticket, you would expect one person to win and hundreds of millions of people to lose.
Put another way, the odds of winning the jackpot are slightly worse than tossing a coin and getting heads 28 times in a row, according to Andrew Swift, a professor of mathematics at the University of Nebraska-Omaha.
Of all the people who bought tickets for the final drawing Wednesday night, only 22.6% of the 292.2 million possible number combinations were covered, according to the Multi-State Lottery Association. That means that 77.4% of number combinations are not covered, and it is an indication of why people so rarely win a jackpot.
Keep in mind that the odds of an individual ticket winning never change, but as more people play, more number combinations are covered and the odds of someone winning increase.
And as bad as the Powerball odds are, they are slightly better than Mega Millions, the other near-national lottery game, with jackpot odds of 1 in 302.6 million. And to be fair, someone won a $1.13 billion Mega Millions prize last month.
Without a doubt, the Powerball jackpot is an incredible amount of money, but it’s also less than you might expect.
That’s because while officials are touting the $1.23 billion prize, it’s for one winner who chooses to get paid through an annuity, with an immediate payment and then annual payments over 29 years. Winners almost always opt for cash, which would be an estimated $595.1 million in Saturday night’s drawing.
Regardless of the payment option, a large portion of the winnings would go to taxes, although that amount would vary depending on the winner’s other assets and whether their state taxes lottery winnings. Keep in mind that the top federal income tax rate is 37%, meaning a large portion of the profits would go to Washington.
