Wednesday’s Powerball Jackpot Swells To $1.2B: What To Know In WA

WASHINGTON — If you’re seeing long lines at the checkout counters of convenience stores and other lottery ticket vendors around the Evergreen State, it’s likely because the Wednesday, Nov. 2, $1.2 billion Powerball jackpot is luring anyone who ever dreamed of being filthy rich.

Wednesday’s Powerball drawing will be held at 7:59 p.m. PDT. Winners may choose to receive their prize as an annuity paid in 30 graduated payments over 29 years, or they may take a cash payout, which is $596.7 million,

The gargantuan jackpot is the second-largest in the 30-year history of the game. Powerball.com will livestream the drawing.

Ticket sales for the Powerball cut off at 6:45 p.m. in Washington, so if you want a shot at the big prize, be sure you’ve picked up your ticket by then. You can find retailers selling lottery tickets on the Powerball website and check your tickets via WA Lottery.

No one matched the winning numbers in the Monday, Oct. 31, drawing — 13, 19, 36, 39, 59 and the Powerball of 13. If no one wins Wednesday, an even larger jackpot will be up for grabs in Saturday night’s drawing.

Don’t bank your future on winning the jackpot, though.

It’s a long shot with odds of 1 in 292.2 million. Overall, though, the odds of winning any prize are about 1 in 24.9, so you may as well play along as long as you don’t go overboard.

In the Halloween drawing, 5.4 million tickets sold matched at least one number. Together, they offered $59.5 million in cash prizes, Powerball said in a news release. Ten of those tickets matched all five white balls for a $1 million prize each.

Just one Powerball jackpot has been claimed in Washington since the game was launched in 1992. Indiana and Missouri have had the most jackpot winners, with 39 and 31, respectively.

Three jackpots over the history of the game have gone unclaimed — one for a ticket purchased in Georgia, another from Indiana and a $16 million jackpot that went unclaimed in Florida.

States set their own rules on how long people have to claim their prizes. It can be anywhere from 60 or 90 days or as much as a year. The expiration date is often listed on the back of the ticket, but if not, check with lottery officials where you live.

And in eight states, winners get a tax break those in other states don’t. All winnings are subject to federal taxes regardless of the state where the prize is claimed, but California, Florida, New Hampshire, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Washington and Wyoming don’t tax lottery winnings.

In other states, CNBC reported, lottery winnings are taxed at rates ranging from 2.9 percent to 8.82 percent.

A Powerball ticket costs $2. For an additional $1 per ticket, players can multiply non-jackpot prizes by up to 10 times with the Power Play feature. One caveat: The 10X multiplier is only available when the advertised jackpot annuity is $150 million or less.

To win the jackpot, a player must match all white balls in any order and the red Powerball number. Lottery officials say chances when players don’t choose their own numbers. About 75 percent of winning tickets over the years were picked by a computer.

Tickets are sold in 45 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands. According to Powerball, more than half of all ticket sales remain in the jurisdiction where the ticket was sold.

The jackpot has gone unclaimed since Aug. 3, and the longer it goes without a winner, the closer it comes to the world record $1.586 billion Powerball jackpot in 2016.

Wednesday’s jackpot is the fourth-largest in U.S. lottery history.