Winning Powerball lottery tickets sold in California, Florida, and Tennessee
Final jackpot total of $1.5864 billion will be split 3 ways
How would you react if you won?
By Todd Northrop
The largest lottery jackpot the world has ever seen has been won Wednesday night by three tickets sold in California, Florida, and Tennessee.
Since the initial jackpot estimate was set to $1.3 billion early Sunday morning, the Powerball lottery jackpot was raised two more times before the Wednesday drawing, and by the time all the sales were totalled at draw time, the jackpot stood at a faint-inducing $1.5864 billion — that's $1,586,400,000.
The lump-sum cash value for Wednesday's drawing was just a hair shy of $1 billion, with the final tally standing at $983.5 million
The Powerball winning numbers for Wednesday, January 13, 2016, were 4, 8, 19, 27, and 34, with Powerball number 10. The Power Play was 2.
Wednesday's Powerball jackpot was the accumulation of 19 consecutive drawings without a grand prize winner over a two-month stretch. The jackpot run-up started as a $40 million grand prize on Nov. 7, 2015.
California Lottery spokesman Alex Travesta said the jackpot-winning ticket was sold at a 7-Eleven in Chino Hills, about 25 miles northeast of Anaheim.
People cheered and took photos in the store's parking lot Wednesday night. A store employee said the 7-Eleven had sold about $12,000 worth of tickets on Wednesday.
"I'm really happy," said an employee of the store at 4092 Chino Hills Parkway, which will receive the maximum bonus of $1 million. "It's very good news."
The three winners probably got very little sleep Wednesday night, as they try to process winning the world's largest lottery jackpot ever.
Are the winners running around the house screaming? Are they calling their family? Or maybe calling their boss to quit their job? What are they planning to do with all that loot?
What is the first thing you would do?
Fortunately, even if you didn't win the jackpot, the Powerball game still offers another 8 ways to win lower-tier prizes.
In addition to the jackpot winners, a whopping 81 lucky players matched the first 5 numbers, but not the Powerball, for a $1,000,000 prize: 4 from Arizona, 12 from California, 3 from Connecticut, 12 from Florida, 2 from Georgia, 2 from Illinois, 1 from Indiana, 1 from Iowa, 2 from Kansas, 3 from Kentucky, 1 from Louisiana, 3 from Maryland, 2 from Massachusetts, 5 from Michigan, 2 from New Jersey, 5 from New York, 2 from North Carolina, 3 from Ohio, 1 from Oklahoma, 3 from Pennsylvania, 2 from Rhode Island, 1 from Tennessee, 4 from Texas, 2 from Virginia, 2 from Washington, and 1 from West Virginia..
Of all the second-prize winners, eight tickets — one of the tickets sold in Arizona, one from Florida, the ticket sold in Iowa, one from New Jersey, both tickets from North Carolina, the ticket sold in Tennessee, and one ticket from Texas — were purchased with the Power Play option for an extra $1. Because they purchased the Power Play, those particular tickets are now worth $2 million.
The California second-prize winners will each receive $638,146 this drawing, because by law California awards all prizes on a pari-mutuel basis, meaning the prizes will change each drawing based on the number of tickets sold and the number of tickets that won at each prize level.
934 tickets matched four white numbers plus the Powerball and won $50,000. Of those tickets, 107 were purchased with the Power Play option, increasing the prize to $100,000, and 141 were sold in California, where the prize was $13,903 this drawing.
The odds to win the Powerball jackpot were 1 in 292.2 million.
Officials with the Multi-State Lottery Association, which runs the Powerball game, had said they expected more than 85 percent of all the possible number combinations have been bought for the drawing.
Had no one matched all of the numbers drawn lottery officials said the next jackpot would have reached $2 billion. https://www.lotterypost.com/news/298363