The powerball jackpot rose to the highest it has ever been on Saturday, $949.8 million, according to ABC News. Nobody matched all of the winning numbers, which were 16-19-32-34-57 with a powerball of 13. The odds of winning Saturday’s Powerball were 1 in 292.2 million.

On Sunday Gary Grief, executive director of the Texas Lottery, told NBC News’ Weekend Today, “At our peak last night, we were selling more than $1.2 million in powerball tickets every single minute.”

According to Jeffrey Miecznikowski, associate professor of biostatistics at the University of Buffalo in New York, picking the right combination of numbers is similar to flipping a coin and getting heads 28 times in a row.

However, Miecznikowski also said that picking all of the winners in the NCAA 64 team basketball tournament is harder than guessing the right Powerball numbers, about one billion times harder to pick all of the winning teams at random. It would still be 500 times more difficult to fill out a bracket with some strategy.

The Powerball jackpot projection for this coming Wednesday is $1.3 billion, which is double that of the previous largest U.S. lottery prize- when Mega Millions paid $656 million to 3 tickets in March of 2012.

“I turn 18 in a week, and I will definitely be buying a lottery ticket. I think it is a fun rite of passage into adulthood, and with the crazy jackpot winning I just have to,” Says Sarah Smith, a senior at Arrowhead High School.

According to an interview with NBC News, Scott Norris, an assistant professor of mathematics at Southern Methodist University, said that there is no trick to playing the lottery, however your miniscule odds of winning are slightly increased if you let the computer pick rather than choosing yourself. This is because when people decide to pick their own Powerball numbers, they tend to chose birthdates and thus generally choose numbers 31 or below, ignoring numbers 32-69 which the Powerball also includes.
Some people believe that purchasing multiple tickets can help increase their odds. While this is true, “it’s important to keep in mind how small they [your odds of winning] are to begin with” states the Associated Press.
According to USA Today, forty-four states (in addition to Washington, D.C., Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands) participate in Powerball. The states that do not participate in Powerball are Nevada, Utah, Mississippi, Alabama, Alaska and Hawaii.

According to ABC News, Utah and Hawaii don’t participate in any sort of gambling, including Indian Reservation Casinos or lotteries for charities. According to Nevada State Gaming Control Board chairman A.G. Burnett, Nevada does not have a lottery because of a decision made by the state legislature over 50 years ago.

Nevada State Gaming Control Board chairman A.G. Burnett told ABC News that Nevada doesn’t have a lottery because of a decision in the state legislature made over 50 years ago. “There was a decision in the state of Nevada as to whether we’d be just a casino-style gaming state or a state that allowed lotteries,” he said. “the legislature put that language in years ago that said, we’re just going to be a casino gaming state without a lottery.”

“There was a decision in the state of Nevada as to whether we’d be just a casino-style gaming state or a state that allowed lotteries,” he said. “The legislature put that language in years ago that said, we’re just going to be a casino gaming state without a lottery.” Burnett told ABC News.

Caption: A copy of the Saturday lottery tickets purchased by the Arrowhead teachers

Picture link: https://drive.google.com/a/arrowheadschools.org/file/d/0B6JO-M52k1-1Rjg1ajAzY2t5a0R1Smxwa2owOU5TYWp5YjRJ/view?usp=sharing