A record 110 players won $500,000 and $100,000 prizes in Powerball drawing March 30, most of whom apparently used the numbers included in a fortune-cookie message. Ordinarily the multistate lottery expects only four tickets to win at the Match 5 prize level.
Several winners in a half-dozen states revealed that they got the winning number from a fortune cookie, said Doug Orr, marketing director with the West Des Moines-based Multi-State Lottery Association, which operates Powerball.
The cookie was one number away from winning the $25.5 million jackpot: The winning numbers were: 22, 28, 32, 33 and 39, with 42 being the Powerball. Tickets that match the first five numbers but miss the Powerball win $100,000 each. There were 89 of those.
According to the Powerball Web site, odds of winning the grand prize are 1 in 120,526,770, and odds of winning the $100,000 prize are about 1 in 2,939,677. Before Wednesday, the most tickets to win second-tier Powerball prizes in one drawing was 91, on Aug. 25, 2001. (Source: Amy Lorentzen, AP Writer, San Francisco Chronicle, Mar. 31, 2005).