The Powerball jackpot continues to swell as Saturday night’s drawing yielded no winners for the grand prize, resulting in an estimated $810 million prize for the upcoming year.
The Powerball drawing on Saturday offered an estimated $760 million jackpot, marking the game’s sixth-largest, but for the 34th consecutive time, no winner emerged.
The last jackpot victory occurred in October, reaching the second-highest in the game’s history at $1.765 billion before taxes.
The next drawing is scheduled for Monday.
In 2016, Powerball made history as the first multi-jurisdictional draw game to surpass $1 billion in jackpot winnings when three tickets split a $1.586 billion prize.
Last year, the game achieved a world record for a government lottery jackpot at $2.04 billion, with a winning ticket purchased in California.
Although this year won’t surpass that record, it has seen four jackpots exceeding $700 million, including Saturday night’s pretax estimated jackpot of $760 million.
However, these figures can be misleading, as they are all pretax and assume winners opt for annuity payments rather than a significantly lower upfront sum.
For Saturday’s potential jackpot, the pretax upfront sum was estimated at $383.6 million. With the growing amount rolling into the new year, the upfront take was estimated at $408.9 million.
Powerball intentionally generates growing jackpots and extended stretches without a winner. The game underwent a redesign in 2015, incorporating changes such as adding more number balls to drawings, doubling ticket prices to $2, and allocating more funds to the grand prize, contributing to the era of massive jackpots.
Victor Matheson, an economics professor at the College of the Holy Cross, explained that Powerball, which began in 1992 with 14 states and the District of Columbia, now covers nearly the entire United States.
Despite the anticipation and excitement, the odds of winning are remarkably slim at 1 in 292.2 million, making the odds of becoming president seemingly more favorable.
“What that means is that you can have a really, really, really hard-to-win lottery,” Matheson said.
