The lucky winner will have to choose between receiving the entire sum via payments spread over three decades and being paid $997.6 million in one go.
A California player has won $2.04 billion in the lottery, the official Powerball website announced on Tuesday, a world record after months without a big winner. A single winning ticket, with the numbers 10, 33, 41, 47, 56 and 10 for the “Powerball”, has been identified across the United States, according to Powerball.
“California Lottery produces the FIRST billionaire in its history!”tweeted California Lottery on Tuesday, which specifies that the “lucky ticket was sold at Joe’s Service Center in Altadena”. The lucky winner will have to choose between receiving the entire sum via payments spread over three decades, or being paid in one go, up to $997.6 million, according to an estimate by Powerball.
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By Monday night, 40 consecutive draws had produced no big winners, leading the jackpot to soar to a staggering sum of over two billion dollars. This jackpot had sparked gambling fever across the United States and the draw originally scheduled for Monday evening had to be delayed by a few hours because the lottery of one of the participating states had requested more time to process its data, according to a tweet Tuesday from the California Lottery. The odds of hitting the jackpot, by buying a two-dollar ticket, were only one in 292.2 million. For comparison, the probability of being struck by lightning is one in a million, according to US health authorities.
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