Powerball redesign, DES MOINES, Iowa - Insurance agent Joe Williams is trying, like so many others, to get lucky with Powerball.
Williams, of Middleton, Wis., won $500
several years ago and now wants to score a little higher. He'll have his
chance Wednesday with the latest drawing for the Powerball jackpot.
It's ballooned to an estimated $360 million, with a cash value of $229.2
million, making it the third largest Powerball jackpot and the seventh
largest jackpot ever.
Williams doesn't necessarily spend more when
the prize is high. But his $4 investment in the quick-pick option means
he does spend.
"I know rationally it makes no sense," he said. "But at the same time, without a ticket, I have zero chance."
Ervin Torok, a truck driver from Sioux Falls, S.D., also is looking for his second chance. He won a $500 prize a few years back.
"You never know," Torok, 52, said while
checking some lottery tickets from a gas station. "Maybe one day you'll
get lucky and win."
Thanks in part to a game
redesign in January 2012, players don't necessarily have to strike big
to get lucky. A $1 increase and new $1 million and $2 million prizes
means the odds of winning something have increased. Just last Saturday,
there was no Powerball jackpot winner, but more than a dozen tickets won
$1 million prizes in 10 states.
The "cross-selling" of Powerball and Mega
Millions tickets in January 2010 began the jump to bigger jackpots
because more people had access to tickets, said Mary Neubauer,
spokeswoman for the Iowa Lottery. Iowa is one of the founding Powerball
states.
Neubauer called large jackpots "the new
normal" and said she expects them to keep surpassing all-time jackpot
records set years ago.
In fact, more than half of
the all-time jackpot records have been reached in the last three years.
The top two all-time jackpots — $656 million from a Mega Millions
jackpot and $587.5 million from a Powerball jackpot — were achieved in
2012.
"It usually took a handful of months, if not
several months, for a jackpot to reach this large amount," Neubauer
said. "Now it's achieving that within a handful of weeks. I think the
redesign is achieving exactly what we had wanted it to achieve, which is
the bigger, faster-growing jackpot."
The last major jackpot win came when a New
Jersey man won a $338.3 million jackpot on March 23. It is now
considered the fourth largest Powerball jackpot in history.
Tom Powers, 52, a janitor from
Omaha, Neb., bought several tickets Tuesday from a convenience store. He
said he would definitely walk away from work if he won the jackpot, but
he's not sure how he would spend all the winnings.
"It's really unfathomable the amount of money this is putting out," Powers said.
The next drawing is scheduled for Wednesday night.