Santa had a whopping present in his sleigh on Christmas Eve. A single winning ticket was sold for Powerball’s jackpot of $1.817 billion \u2014 purchased in Arkansas. It was the second-largest U.S. lottery jackpot ever won.<\/p>\n
The winning numbers for Wednesday night’s drawing were 4, 25, 31, 52, 59, with a Powerball of 19. The grand prize had a lump sum cash value of $834.9 million.<\/p>\n
The Powerball jackpot had been won once before on Christmas Eve, in 2011, and four times on Christmas Day, the game says. Powerball started in 1992.<\/p>\n
The last time a Powerball jackpot was hit was on Sept. 6 in Missouri and Texas, when two tickets split a\u00a0$1.787 billion top prize.<\/span><\/p>\n It was only the second time in the game’s history with back-to-back winning jackpots topping $1 billion, Powerball said.<\/p>\n In 2022, a single ticket sold in Altadena, California, claimed a $2.04 billion jackpot, the\u00a0largest in both Powerball and lottery history<\/span>.<\/p>\n Wednesday’s drawing was the 47th in that jackpot run, a record for the most in a Powerball jackpot cycle, the game says.<\/p>\n To win the jackpot, a ticket must match all five white balls and the red Powerball pulled during a drawing. Single winners of the top prize\u00a0can choose between<\/span> a lump sum payment or a payout via an annuity of one immediate payment followed by 29 annual payments that increase by 5% each time. Both the lump sum and annuity total are before taxes.<\/p>\n The\u00a0odds of winning the jackpot<\/span>\u00a0are 1 in 292.2 million, according to Powerball.\u00a0Lottery jackpots have exploded in size<\/span>\u00a0over the last decade, while the odds of winning have gotten slimmer.<\/p>\n Tickets cost $2 each and are sold in 45 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands. Drawings take place every Monday, Wednesday and Saturday at 11 p.m. ET.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Santa had a whopping present in his sleigh on Christmas Eve. A single winning ticket was sold for<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":2501,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,48],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2500","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","category-us"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.cedritech.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2500","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.cedritech.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.cedritech.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.cedritech.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.cedritech.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2500"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blog.cedritech.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2500\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2502,"href":"https:\/\/blog.cedritech.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2500\/revisions\/2502"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.cedritech.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2501"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.cedritech.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2500"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.cedritech.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2500"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.cedritech.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2500"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}