Face of Nation : The winning numbers for the second-largest jackpot in Powerball history have been revealed.
They are 21, 27, 8, 6, 28, 34 and 7. The Powerball number is 16.
Lottery officials had earlier speculated that up to one in three Australian adults would buy a ticket for the near-record $80 million prize.
It’s the second-highest jackpot in the game’s 23-year history and only the third time an $80 million prize has been offered after no one claimed the division-one prize for the past seven weeks.
In January, a Sydney woman broke the record for the country’s biggest-ever individual lottery prize with a $107 million Powerball win.
The Lott spokesman Matt Hart said in the lead-up to tonight’s draw it would be “frenetic” in-store and online “as Aussies scramble to get their hands on a ticket”, with more than 750,000 expected to be sold.
“The last time we had an $80 million draw, the sales peaked around 5pm on the day of the draw when more than 4200 entries were sold in 60 seconds,” he said in a statement.
“I can’t help but think this was when many people were heading home from work and dreaming about a multimillion-dollar payday. Remember to register those entries, as I’ll be standing by on the night ready to reach out to any division-one winner. It’s a phone call you’re going to want to take.”
Last financial year there were 10 division-one Powerball winners who pocketed nearly $399 million. NSW and Victoria had three winners each, while Queensland, Tasmania, South Australia and WA had one each.
Two-thirds of the winning entries were randomly generated QuickPicks. The rest were marked entries, where the ticketholders chose the numbers themselves. The smallest was a seven-game entry, the biggest a 50-game entry.
To win the division-one prize, players must correctly pick all seven winning numbers plus the Powerball. The chance of winning with a one-game entry is one in 134,490,400 and one in 11,207,534 for a 12-game entry.
While each number has an equal chance of being drawn, according to The Lott some numbers have been drawn more frequently than others over the past 15 months.
From the main barrel, where seven numbers are drawn from 1 to 35, the “hot” more frequently drawn winning numbers are 17 and 2, while the “cold” less frequently drawn winning numbers are 12 and 1.
For the separate Powerball barrel, where a single number is drawn from 1 to 20, the “hot” numbers are 3 and 19, while the “cold” number is 1, which hasn’t made a single appearance during this time.
“Will players pick an entry type based on the fact it has delivered a division-one win in the past, or will they buck the trend and opt for something entirely different figuring lightning doesn’t strike twice?” Mr Hart said.
