Powerball Jackpot Reaches $1.5B; Your Odds of Winning

With the astronomical Powerball jackpot now bumped up to $1.5 billion as seemingly everyone in the country buys a ticket, a statistics expert cautions that buying multiple tickets doesn’t significantly boost your chance of winning the big one.

In fact, one statistician says you are much more likely to die in a car crash than win the Powerball jackpot.

The winner of the largest Powerball jackpot in history will walk away with $1.5 billion. The cash option would mean $930 million, according to lottery officials.

Wednesday’s Powerball drawing time is scheduled for 10:59 p.m. ET.

Find a retailer in Maryland.

According to the Maryland Lottery, the odds of winning Wednesday’s jackpot by matching all five balls in any order as well as the red Powerball are one in roughly 292 million per $2 ticket.

While nobody one Saturday’s jackpot someone who bought a Powerball ticket at the Food Lion store in Berlin won a million bucks. And the lottery says 406,158 Marylanders won amounts ranging from $4 to $1 million.

See related article: Check Your Powerball Numbers: $1M Winner Sold in Maryland

Given the climbing jackpot, if one ticket buys you a chance at the largest jackpot ever, shouldn’t two – or more – tickets increase your odds even more? Not really, say statisticians, including Ronald Wasserstein, executive director of the Virginia-based American Statistical Association.

Buying a thousand tickets in a game with such long odds “increases your relative chance, but your absolute chance is tiny — so tiny that people don’t grasp it,” Wasserstein told The Baltimore Sun.

Consumers don’t really grasp the concept of large numbers, so they don’t get that if you buy 100 tickets your odds are still only 1 in 2,920,000, George Loewenstein, an economics and psychology professor at Carnegie Mellon University, told the newspaper.

“Even after buying 100 tickets, you are still three times more likely to get killed by lightning in the next year, and about 300 times more likely to get killed in an auto crash.”

What Are The Odds?

Seeking to put these odds in context, Patch staffers compiled five events more likely to happen than winning the next Powerball lottery jackpot:

Be Killed At Work - The rate of fatal work injuries for U.S. workers in 2014 was 3.3 per 100,000 full-time equivalent (FTE) workers, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Flip A Coin Heads Up 28 Times In A Row - The chances of picking the right combination of numbers is like flipping a coin and getting heads 28 times in a row, Jeffrey Miecznikowski, an associate professor of biostatistics at the University at Buffalo in New York told USA Today.

Bowl A Perfect Game – Mathematicians estimate that the odds of a non-professional bowling a perfect game are about 11,500 to one.

Being Hit By Lightning – According to the National Weather Service, you have a 1 in 12,000 chance of being hit by lightning sometime in your life.

Be Legally Executed – The National Safety Council estimates that your odds of being legally executed are 1 in 127,717.