What We Can Learn From Billion Dollar Jackpots

The winner of the $1.3 billion Powerball jackpot won on Saturday Apr 6 2024 has now claimed their prize. They came forward last Monday April 8, and are currently going through the rigorous claims process.

This $1.3 billion jackpot is the 4th largest Powerball jackpot in history and it was claimed in Oregon. The prize is also the eighth largest ever of all U.S. jackpot games.

The winning ticket was sold by the Plaid Pantry situated at 6060 NE Columbia Blvd. in Portland.

Those are the facts of the win. But what can we learn from this?

How Many Winners

There was just one winning ticket for the entire $1.3 billion jackpot.

This is an important reminder of just how hard this game is to win. You have to match the 5 main balls plus the Powerball to win. The odds of winning the jackpot are 1 in 292,201,338.

That mind boggling number is more than 1 in 292 million. That’s almost the entire population of the U.S. (the U.S. population was 331,449,281 at the last census on April 1 2020). Which means you would need everyone in the country to buy a ticket, each with a different combination, just to guarantee that 1 person wins.

How Many Rollovers..!

As you probably know, the Powerball jackpot builds. It starts at around $20 million. Then every time it’s not won, it ‘rolls over’ to the next draw. This keeps going until somebody wins.

The last time Powerball was won was on January 1 2024. That means the jackpot rolled over 40 times before anybody won again.

Again, that’s how hard this game is to win. In all of 2023 it was only won 5 times. And bear in mind this is now with 3 draws per week, after Powerball added the Monday draw in 2021.

How Lucky Is Plaid Pantry?

Plaid Pantry will be super happy for the winner of course.

But the owners will be pretty happy for themselves too. Because Plaid Pantry get a $100,000 bonus for selling this winning Powerball ticket.

It’s also not their first rodeo. Plaid Pantry have sold other large Oregon jackpot prizes. They sold a $3.3 million Megabucks ticket last Summer.

Ever seen a ‘big winner sold here’ poster in the store window? There’s a good reason ‘lucky stores‘ do this.

So What Do I Think?

The mega jackpot games, like Powerball, are extremely hard to win.

The two things go hand in hand. To achieve those mega jackpots they need a lot of rollovers. To get lots of rollovers they need to make the odds of winning really bad. Otherwise people would win every draw!

So my question to you would be – why do you want to want to win $1.3 billion? Would you not be super happy with winning e.g. ‘just’ $10 million?

If NOT then keep playing Powerball and Mega Millions. 🙂

But if a more sensible jackpot would be perfectly fine with you. Then look again at the games available to you. Look more closely at those odds. The difference is usually 20, 50, even 100 times better.

Don’t fall into the ‘mega jackpot trap’ just because the news headlines are full of ‘billions’.