Winning Numbers for Wednesday Night's $317 Million Powerball

Lottery officials revealed the winning Powerball numbers Wednesday night for the $317 million jackpot:

24-36-51-52-56-22

There was no news late Wednesday night on whether anyone had won.

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Got dreams of quitting the rat race and retiring to a tropical island or a remote mountaintop? If you’re the winner of the next Powerball lottery — and that’s a big if —you’ll take home $317 million.

Here are the cold hard facts: Your odds of winning are 1 in 175,223,510, according to the folks at the Virginia Lottery. And you won’t take home all of that $317 million. But the cash value of the big prize isn’t bad: $220 million. The largest ever Powerball winnings were won in 2013 by one ticket in Florida for $590 million.

Drawings for the multi-state lottery are twice a week, Wednesdays and Saturdays. The next drawing is tonight (Wednesday) at 11 p.m.

Here’s how the game works:

• Choose your own numbers on a playslip. Pick five different numbers from 1 through 59; then select one Powerball number from 1 through 35.
• Or you can play Easy Pick and let the computer choose your numbers.
• You can also use a combination of these play methods - pick some of your favorite numbers, and let the computer fill in the rest.
• Each play (six numbers) costs $2.
• Powerball draws are held Wednesday and Saturday at 11:00 p.m.
• All prizes, except the jackpot, are fixed dollar amounts. The jackpot total is dependent on the amount of money in the draw’s total prize pool.

You can watch Powerball draws live on Wednesday and Saturday at 11 p.m. by clicking the View Winning Numbers tab at the top of the Virginia Lottery page or by visiting them on Facebook.com/valottery. You can also watch the drawing on WJLA-TV.

Not sure where to buy a ticket? Click here to type in your ZIP code on the Virginia Lottery site.

Since 1999, all Virginia Lottery profits have been used for public education in the Commonwealth, for kindergarten through 12th grade.

In Fiscal Year 2014, the Virginia Lottery had sales of more than $1.8 billion. Of this total, the Lottery generated a record $538.6 million, or 29.7 percent, for public education grades K-12; 59.7 percent went back to players in the form of prizes; 5.6 percent went to the retailers who sell Virginia Lottery tickets, and 5 percent went to operational expenses.