Powerball pot $295 million as numbers drawn

DES MOINES, Iowa (CNN) -- Lottery ticket holders in 21 states and the District of Columbia held their breath Saturday night as the winning numbers in a $295 million Powerball jackpot were drawn.

The winning numbers, drawn at 11 p.m. EDT, were 17, 8, 42, 22 and 47, plus the Powerball number 21. Lottery officials did not know late Saturday whether a winning ticket for the jackpot -- the second-largest in Powerball history -- had been sold.

Each of the millions of tickets sold had an 80-million-to-1 chance of making someone a multimillionaire. Last-minute players lined up to buy tickets on Saturday after snatching up tickets throughout the week.

Powerball officials said they sold $42 million in tickets on Thursday, a sales record for a Thursday. By midday Friday, sales had already topped $42 million and were selling at a rate of 100,000 per minute, spokesman Joe Mahoney said.

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"If we have a surge in sales on Saturday ... it's a possibility that [the jackpot] can exceed or reach $300 million," said Tony Cooper, the president of Powerball Game Group.

The jackpot is so large that if the winner were to stack 280 million one-dollar bills on top of each other, he or she would have a stack of money 19 miles high -- or 3 1/2 times as tall as Mount Everest, the world's highest mountain. Lined up end-to-end, the cash would stretch 27,113 miles -- more than enough to circle the globe at the equator.

Edward Stanek, commissioner of the Iowa State Lottery and a member of the Interstate Lottery Board, said the chances are good that a winner will emerge from tonight's drawing.

"Last week we had about 78 percent of all numbers covered that were possible for us to draw in the course of the game," Stanek said. "That meant that we had less than a 30 percent chance of rolling over and starting over again with this new drawing.

"Right now, we're predicting statistically that we should have somewhere between 90 and 93 percent of all combinations covered. That's not absolute, that's just a statistical probability."

Bob Hainey, a spokesman for the District of Columbia Lottery, cautioned that buying large blocs of tickets does little to improve a player's odds, but "people get swept up in the hoopla."

"It's about fun, not about financial investment. The odds are about one in 80 million," he said. "If you buy a bunch of tickets, you might increase your odds to say, 10 or 100 in 80 million."

The largest lottery jackpot was $363 million, a Big Game prize won by two ticket holders on May 9, 2000. The largest Powerball payout was $295.7 million, won by a single ticket holder on July 29, 1998.

The Powerball winner can choose a cash option, which would be a one-time payment of $162.9 million. If the winner chose annual checks, that would mean $11.2 million per year over the next 25 years.

Despite the odds, Americans packed convenience stores to get their hands on the potential winning ticket. In Rayne, located in the heart of southern Louisiana, about 100 miles from the closest border, hundreds of people packed the Frog City Travel Plaza.

Frog City sold the winning Powerball ticket in December for a $35 million jackpot.

"People are coming here and buying them just because of that," said cashier Mary Diet. "They're hoping that maybe there'll be a second winner at this store."

"It's pretty crazy. We've been pretty busy all day long," she said.

In Greenwich, Connecticut, the story was different. Powerball sales there were suspended Friday after hours-long lines snaked out doors on Wednesday as people from New York overwhelmed businesses and overextended police. Some residents complained of seeing people urinating in public as they waited in line.

Sales resumed there Saturday morning.

In the Midwest, people flooded to the AM&NH Convenience Store in Moor head, Minnesota, across the border from Fargo, North Dakota. The store has been the state's No. 1 Powerball retailer since a $48 million winning jackpot ticket was purchased there four years ago.

"We are swamped," said manager Marie Felix.

She said they have four clerks working the register and that the lines "at times are 15 deep." "Everybody wants to win," she said.

Powerball tickets are sold in Arizona, Colorado, Connecticut, the District of Columbia, Delaware, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Oregon, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Wisconsin, and West Virginia.

Colorado is the newest state in the game, having just joined a few drawings ago.