Big Game Players Check Over Tickets After $325 Million Drawing
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Big Game lottery players checked over their tickets Tuesday night after the winning numbers were drawn for the $325 million jackpot: 7, 10, 25, 26 and 27. The Big Money Ball number was 23.
Lottery officials were expected to announce early Wednesday whether anyone won the big jackpot.
Would-be fatcats flocked to delis, grocery stores and gas stations in search of the big-money prize leading up to the 11:00 p.m. EST drawing. If it goes to one person, it will be the second-larget payout in U.S. lottery history. In 2000, two Big Game winners split $363 million.
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"I'd retire. I'd buy a house and maybe a fishing boat," Darryl Hutchinson said as he prepared to buy 10 tickets at a gas station in Roanoke, Va.
The jackpot in the seven-state game played in Georgia, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Jersey, and Virginia climbed another $25 million Monday after strong sales over the weekend.
Vendors in the Chicago area told reporters earlier in the day the would-be millionaires were standing in line for as long as two hours for a chance to make their picks. But the wait could well be worth it.
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A single winner could take the cash over 26 years or accept a one-time $174 million payout — with at least one-third of that taken out for taxes, of course. Players must pick the payout option when buying the ticket.
The odds of winning are 1 in 76 million. And those are long odds. A dreamer looking to win Big Game lottery is 16 times more likely to get killed driving to the gas station to buy a ticket.
It's also thousands of times more likely the Earth will be destroyed by a meteorite than that one of Hutchinson's tickets will be a winner, according to probability expert Les Krantz. And a person's chance of being hit by lightning in a lifetime is 1 in 9,100 — more than 8,000 times more likely than being the next Big Game winner, Krantz said.
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But those figures didn't deter Glenn Gosselin, who reasoned that you have to play to have any chance of winning at all. He bought a ticket at Neighborhood Food Store in Springfield, Mass., where the Big Game line wound from the cash register to the door.
"If you don't have a ticket, your odds drop to zero," he said.
Still, eighteen drawings in a row have been held without anyone hitting the jackpot, just an indication of just how long those odds are.
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"It's greed. Greed clouds good judgment," Krantz said.
Naturally, he'd bought a ticket too.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.