One of the most popular lotteries in the world is Powerball. People have been winning millions of dollars from Powerball. Some prizes even reach up to a billion dollars, which is a large amount considering some of the wealthiest people don't even have that kind of money in cash.
With that said, there aren't many Powerball jackpot winners because the odds of winning a jackpot aren't a lot. For that reason, whenever a person wins a jackpot or a large amount, it becomes a big deal. In the same way, the largest Powerball jackpot was drawn several days ago. Here is our take on the largest-ever Powerball jackpot.
Before we take a look at the biggest Powerball jackpot, let's first understand what Powerball actually is. Powerball is basically a lottery game. It is an American lottery game which means people from almost all parts of the United States can participate in it.
If you don't know how that works, it's actually pretty simple. A lottery is a type of gambling game where the participants get a random number, with one or more of those numbers containing a prize. The participants pay to get the random number, and the one who gets the winning number gets a huge reward.
Since there is one Powerball for the whole of the United States, Powerball jackpots are quite large. Over the years, Powerball winners have received huge sums of money. Here are the top three biggest Powerball jackpots of all time.
The largest Powerball jackpot ever to be rewarded to a participant is worth a whopping 2.04 billion U.S. dollars. The winning ticket for this jackpot was bought not too long ago from a convenience store at a gas station located in Altadena, California. However, the identity of the person who won the jackpot is not known.
The owner of the convenience store where the winning ticket was sold got one million U.S. dollars for selling the ticket. With that said, the winner won't receive the full amount of $2.04 billion because it is considered taxable income. The winner will get just 63% of the total amount, which is still a ton of money.
The second-largest Powerball jackpot is $1.59 billion. A total of three winners would share this prize money, including Maureen Smith and David Kaltschmidt from Florida, Marvin and Mae Acosta from California, and John and Lisa Robinson from Tennessee. This Powerball jackpot was announced on the 13th of January, 2016.
Like the largest Powerball jackpot, this jackpot was also considered taxable, which is why the winners received a much smaller amount after taxes. Each winner got around $327.8 million. Two of the winners were open about how they spent their winnings, while Marvin and Mae Acosta preferred to retain as much anonymity about this as possible.
The third-largest Powerball jackpot is not that far away from the second-largest. The Powerball jackpot for the third sport was worth $1.54 billion. The jackpot was drawn in October 2018. However, unlike the one in 2016, this jackpot was only for one person. We can say that technically, this one was the second largest Powerball jackpot paid to a single winner.
Surprisingly, the winner of the jackpot did not accept their reward until several months later. The winner kept themselves unknown, but it was revealed that they got $878 million, 37% of which would go to taxes.
After looking at all those prizes, you might want to play Powerball yourself. Fortunately, if you are a U.S. resident and at or above the legal age for gambling, playing Powerball is quite simple. All you have to do is enter a local gas station or grocery store that sells lottery tickets and buy a ticket. The ticket will cost around $2.
While it may be tempting to enter Powerball, you should know that the chances of you winning the jackpot are very small. There are different prizes in the Powerball, with each one having different odds.
The first prize is, of course, the jackpot and could go well over a billion dollars. The odds of you winning the jackpot are around 1 in 292,201,338. Even if you were to win the second prize, you would get two million dollars, but the odds of you winning the second prize are 1 in 11,688,053.52.
