Someone in Connecticut was visited by Lady Luck after they purchased a ticket for Wednesday night’s Powerball.
That ticket is now worth $245 million, with winning numbers 12, 14, 39, 46 and the Powerball is 36. The owner of the ticket has yet to come forward, and lottery officials will only confirm that it was sold somewhere in Connecticut. This means that the winner may not even be from Connecticut, and could have just bought the ticket as they were passing through.
Powerball has not released the name of the store or the city where the winning ticket was purchased.
The $245 million winner may have no idea they hit it big, since several hundred thousand Connecticut residents are still without power as a result of last weekend’s snow storm.
The Powerball is played in 33 states and the odds of winning the jackpot are one in 195,249,054. The amount starts at $20 million and grows every time the twice-weekly game goes without a top winner. The last top winner was on Sept. 14th. This jackpot is the largest payout in Connecticut and the 12th largest Powerball payout overall.
Saturday’s winnings will now be reset back to $20 million.
Connecticut isn’t the only state that handed out lucky tickets for Wednesday’s drawing. A ticket from California won the $78 million Mega Millions jackpot, and a two winning Powerball tickets–one for $1 million and the other for $10,000–were purchased in Little Rock, Ark.
Nineteen tickets matched the first five Powerball numbers, and they were sold in Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Massachusetts, Maryland, Michigan, Missouri, New Mexico, New York, Ohio and Wisconsin. These winners will each receive $200,000.
In mid-January Powerball is set to restructure the game to make it slightly easier to win and initial jackpots will start at $40 million instead of $20 million. However, ticket prices will go up from $1 to $2.
With Associated Press