Powerball ticket.Photo:Getty
Getty
There’s officially a new Powerball winner!
One lucky player in California won Wednesday night’s record-making$1.765 billion jackpotdrawing, the Multi-State Lottery Association announced Thursday morning.
The single ticket matched all six numbers drawn: white balls 22, 24, 40, 52, 64 and red Powerball 10. The Power Play multiplier was 2X.
Powerball tickets are $2 per play. California Lottery listed the sale location as a Midway Market & Liquor in Frazier Park, a small community of about 2,500 people in Kern County, about an hour outside of Los Angeles.
Lottery rules around claiming prizes vary from state to state, some allowing the identity of the winner to remain anonymous. That’s not the case in California, where the lucky player will have to reveal their name.
Overnight, a clerk at Midway Market & Liquor toldKGET-17that while they didn’t know who bought the prize, they wouldn’t be surprised if the winner was a local resident as many go in regularly to get their tickets.
The jackpot ticket holder has up to a year from the day of the draw to change it. They can choose between taking the payment as an annuitized prize worth an estimated $1.765 billion, or a lump sum payment of $774.1 million. Both options are before taxes.
This is the second-largest Powerball jackpot and U.S. lottery jackpot ever won and the fourth billion dollar jackpot in history. All of those winning tickets were coincidentally sold in California.
Thelargest-ever Powerball winwas in November 2022, when a $2.04 billion ticket was sold in California. The third-biggest prize in the lottery’s history — $1.586 Billion — was split between winners in California, Florida and Tennessee following a Jan. 13, 2016 drawing. And the fourth, of$1.08 billion, went to the holder of a ticket sold in California following a July 19 drawing.
Up until Wednesday’s drawing, there had been 35 consecutive Powerball drawings without a winner, driving the cost of the prize up.
Never miss a story — sign up forPEOPLE’s free daily newsletterto stay up-to-date on the best of what PEOPLE has to offer, from juicy celebrity news to compelling human interest stories.No players matched the six numbers drawn on Monday ahead of the winning ticket being pulled on Wednesday, but the drawing still produced 3.7 million winning tickets across the country — including four tickets in California, Indiana, Oregon and Virginia that matched five white balls for $1 million.
One person in Florida not only “matched all five white balls” but also “included the Power Play feature for an additional $1 per play” increasing their prize from the $1 million prize to $2 million.
“Other big wins include 101 tickets that won $50,000 prizes, and 17 tickets that won $150,000 prizes,” according to lottery officials.
Powerball tickets are sold in 45 states, Washington, D.C., Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. They are $2 per play. The overall odds of winning a prize are 1 in 24.9, and the odds of winning the big jackpot are 1 in 292.2 million.
According to Powerball’s website, the jackpot has now been reset to $20 million.
source: people.com
