Saturday's Powerball drawing carries an advertised jackpot of $707 million, ABC7 reported. It is the 38th drawing since anyone last matched all six numbers.
The odds of matching the five white balls and the Powerball are 1 in 292.2 million. The odds of winning any prize in the game are 1 in 24.9.
Two things about that headline number
The first is that $707 million is the annuity figure, paid out over decades. Anyone who wins and takes the money at once receives a substantially smaller lump sum, before federal tax. We are not printing a cash value here because we could not verify the current one from a source we could reach; the California Lottery and Powerball publish it, and that is where to look before making any decision that depends on it.
The second is the scale of 1 in 292.2 million. It is a number that does not sit usefully in the head. One way to hold it: California's entire population is about 39 million, so a single ticket's chance of taking the jackpot is roughly the chance of picking one specific person out of seven and a half Californias.
California specifics we did not print
Prize rules for lottery games differ by state in ways that materially affect what a winner receives, and California's differ from most.
We attempted to verify the California-specific details, including how prizes are structured here and how they are taxed at the state level, against the California Lottery's own site. That site would not load for us this afternoon. Rather than publish those rules from secondhand descriptions, we have left them out. Anyone who needs them should get them from calottery.com or from the lottery directly, not from a news story.
If this stops being entertainment
The California Council on Problem Gambling operates a helpline at 1-800-GAMBLER, available at any hour.
That line belongs in a story like this one for a straightforward reason: a jackpot this size draws in people who do not otherwise play, and the coverage that surrounds it, including this article, is part of what draws them.
