By City News Service
A lottery ticket with five numbers, but missing the Powerball number, in Saturday’s drawing was sold at a Thirst Quencher Liquor in Burbank, located at 440 N. Glenoaks Blvd., and is worth $5,422,749.
Tickets with five numbers, but missing the Powerball number, sold in other states are worth either $1 million or $2 million, but California law requires major payoffs of lottery games to be paid on a pari-mutuel basis, which can be both less and more than $1 million.
There were three other tickets sold with five numbers, but missing the Powerball number, according to the Multi-State Lottery Association, which conducts the game.
The one sold in Michigan is worth $2 million, because the player utilized the Power Play option, where for an additional $1 per play, a ticket with five numbers, but missing the Powerball number, is worth $2 million. The ones sold in Florida and New York are each worth $1 million. The numbers drawn Saturday were 1, 12, 20, 33, 66 and the Powerball number was 21. The estimated jackpot was $748 million, the seventh-largest in Powerball history and 12th largest lottery jackpot in U.S. history.
There were no tickets sold with all six numbers for the 28th consecutive drawing Saturday, pushing the jackpot to $785 million, the fourth-largest in the history of the game which began in 1992 and ninth-largest lottery jackpot in U.S. history.
There have been no drawings with a ticket sold with all six numbers since July 19 when a ticket with all six numbers worth $1.08 billion was sold at a downtown Los Angeles mini market.
Ticket sales will end at 7 p.m. on Monday. The drawing will be held at 7:59 p.m.
The odds of matching all five numbers and the Powerball number is 1 in 292.2 million, according to the Multi-State Lottery Association. 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.
The Powerball game is played in 45 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and U.S. Virgin Islands.
First published in the September 30 print issue of the Burbank Leader.
