Powerball announces winning numbers for record jackpot

Powerball announced the six winning numbers for the record jackpot of more than $900 million on Saturday, setting off a scramble among hopeful lottery players across the country to check if they held a lucky ticket.

The winning numbers — disclosed live on television and online — were 32-16-19-57-34 and the Powerball No. 13. All six numbers must be correct to win, although the first five can be in any order. Texas state lottery spokeswoman Kelly Cripe said it was too early to know if any winning tickets were sold.

Cripe said the estimated size of the jackpot reached $949.8 million, the largest lottery prize in U.S. history. Earlier in the day, the Multi-State Lottery Association had said the jackpot was $900 million.

If no one matches all the numbers on Saturday night, the next drawing is expected to soar to $1.3 billion.

Since Nov. 4, the Powerball jackpot has grown from its $40 million starting point as no one has won the jackpot. Such a huge jackpot was just what officials with the Multi-State Lottery Association, which runs the Powerball game, hoped for last fall when they changed the odds of matching all the Powerball numbers, from about one in 175 million to one in 292.2 million.

By making it harder to win a jackpot, the tougher odds made the ever-larger prizes inevitable.

The U.S. saw sales of $277 million on Friday alone and more than $400 million were expected Saturday, according to Gary Grief, the executive director of the Texas Lottery.

The chance of no one hitting all five initial numbers and the Powerball number was growing slimmer, Grief said, anticipating that about 75 percent of all combinations will have been bought.

“You can throw out the logic. You can throw out the statistics,” said Grief.

“We’ve never seen jackpots like this. It’s a new experience for all of us,” he said.

So many people were buying Powerball tickets in Iowa that lottery spokeswoman Mary Neubauer said some stores were running out of paper for tickets.

The odds are a matter of statistics and probability, but they’re facts that most players may not completely understand, said Ron Wasserstein, executive director of the Alexandria, Virginia-based American Statistical Association.

“Once you get numbers that size, it’s hard for people to wrap their minds around them,” Wasserstein said.

It’s not like players ever had a great shot at winning a jackpot, but by lengthening the odds, he said, “you take odds that were really, really small before, and now they’re nearly twice as small as they were before.”

Players in Lincoln, Nebraska, said they don’t expect to win, but most noted that eventually, someone will take home all that money.

Gary Diaz of Lincoln said he’s bought one or two Powerball tickets every week since a group of his co-workers won a lottery jackpot in 2004.

“Ever since then, I go, hell, if it happened once, it’s gotta happen again,” Diaz said.

Wasserstein said he understands why so many people buy Powerball tickets, calling it a small price for a chance to dream of immense riches.

But Wasserstein said he and his colleagues know too well the nearly impossible odds to plunk down even $2 for a ticket.

“I can assure you,” he said, “there is no office pool for the lottery at the American Statistical Association.”