State lottery sells $3M in Powerball tickets Saturday; jackpot at $900M

The Arkansas Scholarship Lottery has sold more than $10.6 million in Powerball tickets during the latest run, resulting in more than $5 million for state scholarships ahead of Saturday night's $900 million jackpot drawing, according to a lottery news release.

“This is an incredible increase to the Powerball jackpot," said Bishop Woosley, director of the Arkansas Scholarship Lottery. "It shows how much the country has gotten behind the excitement of Powerball fever."

The state lottery has sold more than $3 million in Powerball tickets as of 6 p.m. Saturday, and it sold $2.3 million Friday, according to a tweet by Woosley.

With sales breaking previous records, the odds are growing that someone will win. If no one matches all the numbers, the next drawing is expected to soar to $1.3 billion, according to officials with the Multi-State Lottery Association, which runs the Powerball game.

Since Nov. 4, the Powerball jackpot has grown from its $40 million starting point as no one has won the jackpot. This kind of jackpot was just what lottery officials hoped for last fall when they changed the odds of matching all the Powerball numbers, from about one in 175 million to one in 292 million. By making it harder to win a jackpot, the tougher odds made the ever-larger prizes inevitable.

The bigger prizes draw more players, who in turn make the jackpots even bigger.

The odds are a matter of statistics and probability, but they're facts that most players may not completely understand, said Ron Wasserstein, executive director of the Alexandria, Virginia-based American Statistical Association.

"Once you get numbers that size, it's hard for people to wrap their minds around them," Wasserstein said.

"It's not like players ever had a great shot at winning a jackpot, but by lengthening the odds, you take odds that were really, really small before, and now they're nearly twice as small as they were before."