Powerball lottery: Americans wait months for a winner, then three arrive at once to share $1.6bn rollover

Winning tickets were purchased in Florida, California and Tennessee, but so far no news on who the lucky winners are

Balbir Atwal is the owner of the 7-Eleven store that sold one of the winning Powerball lottery tickets (AP)

Disappointed players of America’s Powerball lottery which offered a record jackpot prize of nearly $1.6bn (£1.1bn) on Wednesday are agog to see who had been the lucky ones. In the end, after weeks of escalating frenzy, not one but three people had bought winning tickets.

Officials with state lottery commissions confirmed that the giant pot of money, the biggest in the game’s history, would thus have to be split three ways. Winning tickets had been purchased in Florida, California and Tennessee. Each winner will have to decide whether to take their share as annuities, paying out dividends over several years, or in a lump sum, which would be diminished because of tax.

That means that this jackpot, if taken as lump sums, would amount to $983m (£682m). Or just over $327m (£227m) per person. That falls just shy of the biggest single Powerball prize paid to just one person. That was $370m (£256m) to a player in Florida.

First, though, the winners had actually to step forward and claim the prize. While the draw took place at 11pm on Wednesday, by noon today there had still not been any confirmation from any of the three states that any winner had done so. What was known, however, were the shops where the winning tickets had been purchased. In Chino Hills, California, just east of Los Angeles, crowds had descended by sunrise on a 7-Eleven shop to celebrate its good fortune and their neighbourhood’s brief moment in the spotlight.

For having sold one of the three tickets, the shop’s owner, Balbir Atwal, was to receive $1m (£695,000) from the state lottery commission, the same payout awaiting the other two shops. “Nothing happens without God,” Mr Atwal, told the SFGate news site. “He controls everything. And the angels, too.” Never mind that God had forsaken all the rest of us who were disappointed.

The common anecdote was that you were more likely to be eaten by a shark and struck by lightning (twice) on the same night than be declared the winner. But that didn’t deter the punters who, by dint of stubborn optimism and a collective ability to ignore the odds, flocked in droves to put a few bucks down on a dream, clogging cash registers everywhere for those merely in search of milk or cigarettes.

More accurately put, each ticket bought for Wednesday’s Powerball gave you a one-in-292-million chance of claiming that top prize. But according to lottery officials, there was a moment during Wednesday’s rush-hour, when Americans were spending $1.3m a minute on Powerball tickets.

There was always the chance, meanwhile, that no one would get the winning sequence. That’s why the jackpot was already the biggest in US history. This particular Powerball game, which is played in 44 states, had begun in November, rolling over each time a draw failed to produce a winner, Had that happened again, the next draw would have been on Saturday, with $2bn as the top prize.

By their nature, lotteries leave the vast majority disappointed. But no one was hurting more than the owners of a restaurant in New Jersey who thought they had won. A video that quickly went viral on the internet showed the place erupting in joy when someone read out the winning numbers of their ticket. The cheering and dancing stopped when someone realised that though the numbers on the ticket were right, it was a ticket from the previous draw.

In addition to the jackpot, there were scores of other winners with smaller, if still significant, payouts. Five tickets worth $1m each were sold in Michigan, for instance. About half the money that people spend on Powerball tickets actually goes to prizes. Roughly 40 per cent goes to causes like education and the remainder on administration costs.