If you feel like you’re seeing more more lottery winners surpass that $1-billion mark you’re completely right.
The jackpot for Saturday night’s Powerball drawing has risen up to $1.6 billion, making it the most ever. It’s also the second billion dollar prize of 2022, after no players claimed the biggest prize of Wednesday’s drawing. It’s the fifth time a U.S. lottery prize has exceeded 10 digits since the year 2016, when the initial billion-dollar prize jackpot was declared.
The rise in the number of jackpots is through design, according to experts — and the chances of you getting a huge jackpot are greater than ever.
Take this into consideration: If no one takes home a prize in a lottery draw, the winnings will roll over to the next draw which increases the amount of money in the jackpot. Make that lottery harder to win, and you could almost guarantee bigger jackpots on a regular basis by incentivizing more people to purchase lottery tickets.
파워볼사이트‘s organizers are gradually making the lottery harder to win over the years According to Victor Matheson, an economics professor at the College of the Holy Cross who studies lotteries.
The most significant change occurred in 2015, when the lottery added more numbers, which halved chances of winning the jackpot. Prior to that, your odds of winning the Powerball lottery was 1 one in 175 million, Matheson declares. Today, those odds are 1 in 292.2 million.
“They’ve been playing Powerball or its predecessor for [34 years], and they’ve gradually been making it more difficult and harder to win,” Matheson tells CNBC Make It.
How lottery organizers can grow the billion-dollar jackpots
Making the game harder isn’t just the one strategy organizers employ to boost the jackpots.
The nonprofit Multi-State Lottery Association (MUSL) is a consortium of lotteries including Powerball it has been making a greater portion of its income from ticket sales toward the jackpot instead of smaller jackpots, Matheson says — even as those smaller amounts are becoming easier to win.
MUSL has also been steadily expanding Powerball’s footprint. Powerball tickets are now available within 45 U.S. states, including 14 states added since 2009.
A large part of that growth stems from MUSL’s 2009 agreement with the state consortium that operate Mega Millions. Mega Millions lottery. Prior to that, both lotteries were exclusively operated in separate states and their agreement has paved the way to bigger jackpots for both Powerball as well as Mega Millions.
Mega Millions followed Powerball’s path in 2017, both increasing the cost of tickets and including more numbers in order in order to increase jackpot sizes. Mega Millions’ odds have also increased because of this The odds currently for getting lucky are 1. 302.6 million, which is down from 1 in 259 million.
In recent times, the rising interest rates are also helping lottery operators offer bigger jackpots.
A lottery’s advertised jackpot size is determined by the amount a winner could receive if they chose to be paid in an annuity over the course for 30 years. An increase in interest rates at the time of an event means a larger amount of money that can be withdrawn from the annuity fund, according to MUSL’s website.
However, a lottery’s lump sum cash option is directly driven via ticket sale. The lump sum of the current Powerball Jackpot is $782.4 million. This would lead to an annuity plan that ultimately pays out $1.6 billion over the course of three decades based on the current interest rates.
The week before this week, when the Powerball jackpot was $1.2 billion, and an option for a lump sum that was close to $600 million Matheson stated that the “same amount of cash, even if you were taking it at the lowest interest rates during the Covid recession [in 2020] might have only purchase about $800 million of advertised value back then.”
Will jackpots keep getting bigger and what does this mean to you?
Today’s lottery operators have found the perfect spot for their games by “having odds roughly similar to the number of people being served,” Matheson says. The Powerball odds are 1 in 292 million, and the combined populations in the states where tickets are sold equal around 3 million.
The result is a lottery that has eye-catching jackpot numbers even though it is won “frequently enough that we don’t get discouraged,” Matheson says. “Because it’s all about selling optimism.”
Also, organizers shouldn’t have any reason to keep making lotteries harder to win, unless jackpot sizes continue to grow too. Bigger jackpots would probably involve increased ticket prices or expansions to additional states, and the fact is that only 5 U.S. states don’t already sell Powerball as well as Mega Millions tickets.
Their combined population is relatively tiny, with a total of 13.5 million .
The positive news for those who play the lottery was that, when MUSL changed its format to make it more difficult to win and also make smaller prizes much easier to win to help to alleviate the frustration of not taking home millions, Matheson says.
The reality is that a cash payout of $4 on a ticket to the lottery worth $2 isn’t the most attractive jackpot, which is why lottery operators are willing to divert more of their revenue toward bigger jackpots.
“That’s the reason everybody plays the game to win big,” Matheson says. “You’re not writing any stories about the person who won $4.”
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