The U.S. Powerball lottery is holding a drawing this week for a jackpot that’s already reached $1.5 billion. That’s after the 18 drawings held since November failed to yield a winner, causing the grand prize to swell to this record sum.
This jackpot is drawing such attention that more people are buying tickets, and even the lottery’s own projections are changing rapidly. During the weekend the payout was an estimated $1.3 billion. Monday it was revised to $1.4 billion and on Tuesday it hit $1.5 billion.
That makes it the largest lottery grand prize the world has ever seen, even compared with the “El Gordo“ lottery in Spain, which in December awarded a larger cache of prizes ($2.4 billion) but spread it among thousands of winners.
The odds of winning this huge sum of money on Jan. 13 are very small (1 in 292 million). You are 250 times more likely to be hit by lightning. If every adult in the United States purchased just one ticket, each with a different number, there would still be a good chance (about 15 percent) that no winner would arise and the pot would grow even larger.
On Wednesday night, however, a winner is actually very likely, since many lottery players are not limiting themselves to a single ticket and the massive prize is luring hordes of Americans to try their luck, along with—reportedly—thousands of Canadians.
