Powerball: Why Your Odds Of Winning Went Up - Or Down
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NORTH TEXAS (CBSDFW.COM) - Yeah, yeah, you're planning your Powerball jackpot press conference like an Academy Award acceptance speech -- but not so fast! So far, there have been 19 Powerball drawings without a grand prize winner.
Before lunch on Wednesday, the Powerball jackpot stood at more than 1.5 billion.
Remember, the lack of a grand prize winner is exactly what the Multi-State Lottery Association had in mind when they redesigned the Powerball game last year. Part of that revamping meant changing the amount of numbers available to choose from on a Powerball ticket.
Before the fall of last year, players chose five numbers from a pool of 59. There are now 69 number to choose from. Last year the pool of Powerball numbers stood at 35. It was decreased to 26. When speaking about the grand prize only, all of those little switcheroos mean the odds of walking away with the big jackpot increased from 1 in 175,223,510 to to 1 in 292,201,338.
Officials said the reason for the change was to increase the chances there would be no grand prize winner for any given drawing -- and it's working.
Now if your a "glass half full" kind of person, there is an upside. The changes, that went into effect in October 2015, also give players a greater chance at winning smaller prizes. For instance -- the amount won for matching all of the first five number used to be $10,000, it's now $50,000.
In all, officials said the odds of winning a prize (any prize) went from one in 32 to one in 25.
So what that players lose an average of 47-cents on the dollar... lottery proceeds go to education. Don't they? The executive director of the Texas Lottery, Gary Grief, says, "Every school district in Texas is going to reap benefits from this great Powerball jackpot." And that is true. Grief estimates that sals from this one Powerball jackpot mean, "We will be able to contribute at least $50 million in additional monies to public schools."
As it stands, the Texas Lottery Commission allocates lottery monies as follows - some 63 percent is paid out in prizes; a little more than 5 percent is used for retail commissions; 4 percent covers lottery administration costs; and approximately .4 percent is used for veteran's assistance and other state programs. That leaves roughly 27 percent being put into the Foundation School Fund for education.
While in 2015, the Texas Lottery contributed more than $1.2 billion to the Foundation School Fund, the amount went into a state school budget that is more than $50 billion. That means lottery money contributed less than 3 precent to education in the state.
Regardless of your feelings about the odds or distribution of money, there's a strong chance you or someone you know (well enough to ask for a piece of the pie if they win) will be picking up tickets for Wednesday night's Powerball jackpot.
It's not like big winners haven't come from Texas before. In 2015, three tickets won a Powerball jackpot of $564.1 million, and one was in Princeton, Texas. A store in the Collin County city, along U.S. Highway 380, sold the ticket.
The jackpot is truly astounding to players and lottery officials. Grief said, "I have worked at the Lottery Commission for more than 20 years and I've never seen anything like this."
The next Powerball drawing happens tonight at 9:59 p.m. To play the game players select five numbers from one set and one number from a second set. Tickets cost $2.
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