The 14th-largest lottery jackpot in U.S. history, $815 million, will be on the line in Wednesday’s Powerball drawing after no tickets with all six numbers were sold for 37 consecutive drawings.
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.
Ticket sales for the next drawing end at 7 p.m. Wednesday, and the drawing will be conducted at 7:59 p.m.
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.
Wednesday’s jackpot is the seventh-largest in the history of the Powerball game, which began in 1992. There have been seven larger jackpots for the Mega Millions game, which began in 1996 as The Big Game and was given the new name Mega Millions in 2002.
The Powerball game is played in 45 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and U.S. Virgin Islands.
Two tickets with five matching numbers, but missing the Powerball number, for Monday’s drawing were sold — one in Georgia, the other in Texas. They are each worth $1 million.
The numbers drawn Monday were 16, 19, 34, 37, 64 and the Powerball number was 22. The estimated jackpot was $777 million.