Last night's historically huge Powerball jackpot is going to dramatically change the life of somebody in Chicopee, Massachusetts. But two Bay Area ticket-holders aren't doing too bad themselves after getting five of the numbers correct, just not the Powerball. As the Chronicle reports, three such tickets were sold in California this past week, two of them locally one at a Chevron gas station in Milpitas and the other at the Lucky supermarket in Daly City.
Both winners had the five numbers drawn 6, 7, 16, 23, and 26 just not the Powerball number, 4.
Weirdly, the same Chevron in Milpitas sold a winning jackpot ticket in 2014 that was worth $425 million, so you know where to go the next time there's a big jackpot at stake.
The odds of winning Wednesday night's jackpot, the second largest in US history, were one in 292,201,338.
As the Washington Post reported this week, tweaks to the Powerball game made in October 2015 namely increasing the number of available numbers from 59 to 69 made the odds of winning way slimmer than they used to be. Back in those days, the chances of taking the jackpot were about one in 175 million. This is why we're seeing bigger and bigger jackpots these days, like the largest ever in US history in January 2016, which was $1.6 billion. That jackpot was split between three winners.
