Yet the ticket went unclaimed for months. Finally, on March 4, just under the cutoff, a woman came forward to claim the prize. We love stories like this. Lottery wins are a staple of local news coverage, and periodically, when the jackpot climbs high enough, the national press gets in on the action too — and even people who otherwise would never think of it might find themselves shelling out for a ticket.
But while the game of lightning-strike fame and fortune might seem like a product of the modern culture that birthed Instagram and the Kardashians, the roots of the lottery in America are as old as the country itself. First, a few definitions. Under the umbrella of lottery games are many types: number or daily games such as Pick 3 and Pick 4 , instant games scratch-off tickets , keno in which players pick numbers to match numbers chosen by the game from a certain quantity of numbers — 10 of 20 of 80, for instance , online games, and more.
While the ways to play have expanded over time, along with the jackpots, the basic concept of lotteries is swirled into the DNA of the country; they were first used to fund the colonies and eventually became the province of the newly formed states. As Jonathan Cohen detailed in a great piece for Vox, they served and still do as a sort of voluntary tax, bringing in significant sums for the government without the type of pushback that raising tax rates elicits:.
Once states took control of the lottery system, they could authorize games as they saw fit in order to help specific institutions raise money.
State governments owned lottery wheels, which were used for drawing tickets, and politicians would lend them to the organizations the state permitted to hold drawings. Though conservative Protestants have opposed gambling for centuries, many of the first church buildings in the United States were built with lottery money. Parts of the campuses of Harvard, Yale, Brown, Princeton, and Dartmouth were paid for with lottery money, and the New York legislature held multiple lotteries to fund the creation of what is now Columbia University.
And because lotteries were tied to specific institutions — or even specific buildings — the public had obvious evidence of their effectiveness in avoiding taxes and building the new nation. If their horse won, so would they. After that, the lottery began to catch on in other states. These days, 44 states and the District of Columbia run their own lotteries.
So people in those states who want a crack at the multimillion-dollar jackpots regularly offered by the major multi-state lotto games, Powerball and Mega Millions, are out of luck. And what, you might ask, is the difference between the two games, anyway? Powerball draws five balls from a lot of 69, versus five from 70 for Mega Millions.
The cycle of highly publicized mega-jackpots followed by a trickle of lesser winnings is by design. Powerball reduced its odds to produce bigger prizes in , and Mega Millions followed suit two years later.
All that spending adds up to tens of billions of dollars for state governments, which largely goes to education though it still represents just a tiny fraction of overall state spending. And even for those rare few whose hopeful ticket purchases actually pay off, their issues might just be beginning. To preface: In a majority of states, lottery winners are legally not allowed to remain anonymous. As Aditi Shrikant wrote for Vox :. In only eight states — Delaware, Georgia, Kansas, Maryland, North Dakota, Ohio, South Carolina, and Texas — are winners allowed to conceal their names, but even then, they can only stay anonymous below a certain earnings threshold or for a certain time period.
But this also means that winner is now low-grade famous — and a potential target for robbery, kidnapping, scam artists, and even murder. Per the National Endowment for Financial Education , 70 percent of lottery winners end up bankrupt in just a few years.
PowerBall Plus is played every Tuesday and Friday evening, with draws taking place at alongside the main PowerBall game. It costs R2. You do not need to select an additional set of numbers to take part, as the board you pick for the main game will also then be entered into the supplementary Plus game. Separate draws are conducted for both games, with five main numbers randomly selected from 1 to 50, along with one additional PowerBall number between 1 and Ticket sales close half an hour before the draw, at - find out how to enter online and in-store below: Online.
There are various other ways to play, including online, in-store and via the websites and apps of some major banks. Visit the How to Play page for more information about these different entry methods. To win the PowerBall Plus jackpot, you need all of your chosen numbers to match the full set of winning numbers.
If nobody does that in a given draw, the top prize will roll over to the next draw and keep growing until it is won. The two lowest categories offer fixed awards, and then a percentage of the remaining prize pool is allocated to each of the other divisions.
The prize pool consists of 48 percent of the money raised from ticket sales. The table below shows all the different ways you can win a prize, along with the odds of doing so.
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