WASHINGTON, November 27 (RIA Novosti) - With dreams of new houses, cars and endless vacations on their minds, Americans are lining up this week to buy tickets for the $425 million Powerball lottery jackpot, the largest in the game’s history.
“When it gets this big, I’ll buy a couple of tickets. It’s kind of exciting. You get this feeling of anticipation. You get to think about the fantasy,” said Skip Garibaldi, a mathematics professor at Emory University in Georgia, who told ABC News that you are three times more likely to die from a falling coconut than to win the Powerball jackpot.
The odds of claiming the jackpot are 1 in 175 million, and despite the slim chance of winning, millions of US residents have been lining up at gas stations, grocery stores and supermarkets throughout the country to buy the $2-dollar tickets before Wednesday night’s drawing.
The Powerball lottery is offered in 42 States, Washington, DC and the US Virgin Islands.
The current jackpot has already rolled over 16 consecutive times without a winner. The jackpot has risen drastically over the past few days when no winning numbers were announced in the drawing on Saturday night when the windfall was an estimated $325 million.
This is the second biggest lottery jackpot ever in the world according to The Associated Press. The largest, a $656 million Mega Millions lottery was claimed by a trio of ticket buyers in the US last March.
