You probably know that Powerball offers huge jackpots, sometimes even reaching into the hundreds of millions of dollars. If you live in one of the U.S. states that offer this lottery game, you’ve probably even played it. Those massive jackpots are tempting, aren’t they? But do you know anything about the history of Powerball? How did it start? Actually, Powerball didn’t start out as Powerball. It started out as Lotto America.
In 1987, Lotto America was the first game offered by the Multi-State Lottery Association. The Multi-State Lottery Association is run by the individual states and helps to fund such things as education and other government projects. The first participants of the game were Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Oregon, Rhode Island, West Virginia, and DC and they offered the Lotto America game to the residents of their respective states.
Lotto America was created so that they could offer big jackpots. See, you need a lot of people buying lottery tickets to be able to offer such big jackpots and, so, individual states could not do that on their own. The new lottery game was able to offer jackpots in the tens of millions of dollars range and that was a big deal back then. The game also played differently from the current Powerball. It was a 7-40 game, meaning that players had to match 7- 파워볼사이트 out-of-40 numbers to win the jackpot. The odds of winning were approximately 1-in-18-million, which, at the time, were the longest odds of winning any lottery in the United States.
A few short years later, the format of the game changed. It changed to a 6-54 game. 6-54 is harder to win than 7-40, but with the change came another change – You were given two tickets for each dollar spent. That meant that for every dollar, your odds actually improved to approximately 1-in-13-million.
It wasn’t until 1992 that Lotto America actually changed its name to Powerball. In the original Powerball format, the odds of winning were approximately 1-in-55-million. Over the years, those odds kept getting worse and worse. Today, the odds of winning Powerball are approximately 1-in-195-million, making it the hardest lottery in the entire world to win.
Today, with Powerball being offered in 31 states, DC, and the U.S. Virgin Islands, it also may be the most popular lottery game in the world.
If you played the lottery back in the late 80’s, you might have wondered whatever happened to that Lotto America game. Now you know!
