Lottery: Winning ticket worth $758M sold at different store

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Thursday, August 24, 2017
Powerball numbers drawn
The numbers have been drawn for the massive Powerball jackpot.

The winning ticket for Wednesday's $758.7 million Powerball jackpot was sold in Massachusetts, lottery officials have confirmed.

Massachusetts State Lottery officials corrected the site where the single winning ticket for the Powerball jackpot was sold to Chicopee, not Watertown.

The Massachusetts State Lottery had announced around 2:30 a.m. Thursday that a convenience store in Watertown, near Boston, had sold the winning ticket.

But shortly before 8 a.m., the lottery said it had made a mistake, and that the winning ticket was sold across the state at the Pride Station & Store in Chicopee, in Western Massachusetts.

The lottery did not say how the error was made.

It said the store at Handy Variety in Watertown did sell a ticket that won a $1 million prize.

"There was one Powerball jackpot winner Wednesday and 9,397,723 additional players won prizes totaling more than $135 million," according to the Powerball website. "The estimated jackpot will be reset to $40 million."

The numbers for the jackpot -- the second-largest Powerball jackpot in history -- were drawn Wednesday night.

The numbers drawn were 6, 7, 16, 23, 26. The Powerball was 4.

The $758.7 million jackpot is second only to a $1.6 billion prize shared by three people in January 2016.

The current jackpot refers to the annuity option, doled out in 30 payments over 29 years, increasing 5 percent annually. Nearly all winners favor the cash option, which would now be $443.3 million.

The odds of matching all six numbers are only one in 292.2 million -- but the odds of winning another prize are a bit more encouraging.

Powerball is played in 44 states plus Washington, D.C., Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands, all of which collectively oversee the game.

Earlier Wednesday, lottery players in the Triangle scooped up $2 Powerball tickets in hopes of beating the odds.

Eagles Express in Knightdale is a popular spot for snapping up lottery tickets.

"It'll be pretty quiet now until probably starting around 5 o'clock, and then it'll start building up, and building up and building up and along about 9 o'clock we'll have everybody and their uncle in here trying to take and get their numbers for the night's drawing," said Dennis Johnson, an Eagles Express worker.

Eagles Express has been a fairly lucky spot for some lottery players, Johnson said.

A few winners have come out of that location. The highest jackpot, he said, was about $250,000.