One ticket sold in California matched all the winning numbers drawn on Saturday for the Powerball jackpot that soared to an estimated $448.7 million on a surge of last-minute buying, lottery officials said.
The numbers revealed just after 11 p.m. were 32,26,20,38 and 58, with a Powerball 3. Lottery officials said one ticket, purchased in Sun City, California, matched all the numbers for the grand prize.
The lump sum payout for the winning ticket would be $279.1 million.
The grand prize in the multi-state U. S. lottery soared to its highest in months after 19 straight drawings failed to produce a winner.
The last Powerball drawing to produce a jackpot winner was on April 1, said California Lottery spokesman Mike Bond. California is one of 44 states, plus Washington, D. C., Puerto Rico and the U. S. Virgin Islands, that participate in Powerball.
Saturday’s estimated $447.8-million jackpot, the seventh largest in Powerball history, beat out the $435.3 million won by a ticket buyer in Indiana in a Feb. 22 drawing, after a late surge in ticket buying.
That anonymous winner, described by his spokeswoman as a manufacturing plant worker who graduated from Purdue University, chose the lump-sum cash option of $263.5 million when he came forward in March.
The odds of winning Saturday’s grand prize are roughly 1 in 292 million.
Powerball’s jackpot hit a record $1.6 billion in January 2016, when three winning tickets were sold in Florida, California and Tennessee.
(Reporting by Alex Dobuzinskis in Los Angeles and Chris Michaud in New York; Editing by Patrick Enright and Cynthia Osterman)
