During the whole month of October there was an enormous amount of speculation and a huge amount of money gone to one of the biggest multi-state jackpots, the Powerball. It was a total frenzy, the jackpot reached its highest point of $254 million and up till now, the winner hasn’t even claimed the prize!

But what does it take to actually pocket this huge jackpot? The odds are approximately 1-in-195-million, and although it has been quoted over and over again, people simply don’t have an idea of what it actually implies. The good news is that these odds will be improving a bit after the new implementations of this game are enforced in January next year. Lottery winning numbers

However, do you know what the odds of matching 5 numbers are? The odds of matching 5 numbers are 1-in-5,138,133. Matching 5 numbers gets you the second prize, which is $200,000. If you look at it, in relation to the probability, the prize is not making justice to the chances of actually winning it. National lottery

During October’s Powerball draws, the jackpot kept on growing because no-one hit the jackpot for over 18 weeks however every week there were people who did win the second prize.

Leland Hughes won $200,000 in the October 15th draw. He claimed his winnings at Georgia Lottery’s headquarters on November the 4th. Speaking about the win, Leland said, “I couldn’t believe it. My wife checked online, and she kept looking at the numbers.”

Leland Hughes was just one number away from winning the Powerball jackpot, which was more than $100 million at that time. However he is very happy with winning $200,000 and it is still a nice prize.

But he is not the only one, Graden Bass was one of those people dreaming about being rich when he saw the jackpot soaring. Graden has a motto about winning: “If you are going to dance, you have to get on the floor.” So he bought a ticket and wanted to aim it as high as the stars. Yes he won, but at the same time, he lost.

Graden Bass matched the first five numbers. He won $200,000 which is big amount of money. But Graden was playing for the jackpot. What’s the difference between the Powerball jackpot and the second prize? Just one number and it means the world because in this case there is a difference of hundreds of millions of dollars. If Graden had matched just one more number, he would have won the jackpot of more that $100 million. He needed just one ball to match.

So Graden won $200,000, yes he is a winner but this win might be bittersweet because he really had his mind and heart and soul set on the jackpot and he got just a tiny piece of that huge cake. Better than nothing, but maybe not good enough for Graden.