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If you’re reading this, buy a Powerball ticket.
Monday’s Powerball jackpot drawing will be worth an estimated $785 million, the game’s fourth-largest prize, coming in only behind three billion-dollar jackpots drawn since 2016.
The Monday night jackpot — scheduled to be drawn at 10:59 p.m. EST — will come after no one claimed the prize following Saturday night’s drawing, when the prize was $725 million.
The numbers drawn Saturday night were white balls 1, 12, 20, 33 and 66 and red Powerball 21.
Powerball tickets are sold for $2 each. The game requires players to pick five numbers between 1 and 69 for the white ball drawings, and one number between 1 and 26 for the red Powerball. Winning the jackpot requires matching all five white balls and the red Powerball, and players can win smaller prizes through other matching combinations.
There were three winners — in California, Florida and New York — who took home a $1 million cash prize Saturday night after matching all five white balls, and one winner, in Michigan, who won a $2 million cash prize. Another 30 tickets won $50,000 prizes, and nine tickets won $100,000 prizes.
If there’s a winner Monday night, they’ll be able to choose between getting the full prize paid out in installments over 29 years, or a lump sum payment estimated to be about $367 million — both before taxes.
But before you spend too much time thinking about which option you’d choose, keep in mind that while the overall odds of winning any prize in the next drawing are about 1 in 25, the odds of winning the jackpot are far less likely: 1 in about 292 million.
The last Powerball jackpot, worth $1.08 billion, was won July 19 and sold in downtown Los Angeles. Since then there have been more than two dozen consecutive drawings since without a jackpot winner.
The largest-ever jackpot — valued at $2.04 billion — was won last November in California.
