The Powerball jackpot is soaring. There's just one problem: You likely won't win.
The Powerball jackpot has climbed to an estimated $950 million — the sixth-largest jackpot in the lottery game's history — after no one won the $850 million grand prize on Wednesday.
If there's a winner from Saturday night's drawing, they can choose between a $950 million prize paid out in yearly payments or one big payment estimated at $428.9 million. Both amounts are before taxes.
The odds of winning the Powerball grand prize are 1 in about 292 million, which are slightly better odds than winning a Mega Millions jackpot, which is 1 in approximately 303 million.
To put those numbers in perspective, the chances of getting eaten by a shark are 1 in 264 million. (The chances of simply being attacked by one are higher: 1 in 5 million.)
The chances of being struck by lightning are about 1 in a million. So you are almost 300 times more likely to be struck by lightning than you are to win Powerball or Mega Millions.
Have you ever wondered how the chances of winning the Powerball stack up against other unlikely events, like the chances of being eaten by a shark? Attacked by a grizzly bear? Or being struck by lightning — twice? What about the odds of winning an Olympic medal? Or becoming president of the United States? Well, there's a better chance of any of that happening to you than winning Saturday's Powerball jackpot.
Tim Chartier, a professor of mathematics and computer science at Davidson College in North Carolina, likes to think about it this way: Winning the lottery is the equivalent of flipping heads on a coin 28 times in a row. Twenty-eight times!
Another way to visualize it, Chartier says, is to have someone look back at the past nine years, pick one second and then ask someone else to guess the second they chose. The chances of picking the correct second are about the same as winning the lottery: 1 in 300 million.
For Powerball, winners pick five different numbers from 1 to 69 for the white balls and one number between 1 and 26 for the red Powerball. To calculate the odds, there are 11,238,513 possible combinations of choosing five different numbers from 1 to 69.
