$200,000 Powerball ticket sold locally

Published 10:30 am Friday, May 15, 2009

Someone is $200,000 richer. Well, roughly $135,500 richer after taxes.

Officials for the Minnesota State Lottery confirmed Thursday that a Powerball ticket purchased in Mower County for the Wednesday, May 13 drawing had the first five numbers correct, minus the power ball number. No one picked all five numbers correctly plus the power ball number to win the $129 million jackpot.

Powerball is a lottery game that is played by a combined 32 states, with the numbers drawn every Wednesday and Saturday.

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Winning jackpot of five numbers, plus power ball: 1 in 195,249,054

Winning $200,000 prize for matching first five numbers and no power ball: 1 in 5,138,133

As of Thursday evening, Debbie Hoffmann, public relations manager for the Minnesota State Lottery, said the $200,000 prize had yet to be claimed.

“Nobody has come in, and nobody has called,” she said.

The winner has one year to claim the prize.

Hoffmann said that in Wednesday’s drawing, there were five, $200,000 winners in all, including the one in Minnesota and one each in Arizona, Florida, Indiana and Tennessee. Two more lottery players, one from Tennessee and one from Florida, matched the first five numbers, but paid $1 more on their ticket for the power play and won $1 million.

The last Minnesotan to win the Powerball jackpot was a Waseca man who took a cash option of $88 million in May of last year.

According to the Minnesota State Lottery’s Web site, the odds of winning the Powerball jackpot, matching the first five numbers and the power ball number, are more than one in 195 million. The odds of matching the first five numbers without the power ball are more than one in 5 million.

Hoffman said it varies on how often a Minnesota player wins a $200,000 prize.

“It’s hard to say,” she said. “We might get two in a drawing and then three in a row, and then we might go for two months and not have any.”

The Minnesota State Lottery is headquartered in Roseville, and Hoffman said all a winner has to do is claim the prize at their office. In the Mower County case, Hoffman said the winner will receive a check for roughly $135,000 after 32.25 percent of taxes are taken out.

According to lottery records, the $200,000 winner is one of the largest for Mower County in the history of the Minnesota State Lottery, which sold its first ticket in April of 1990.

Other local significant winnings include $751,915 claimed in 2001; $475,357 claimed in 1991; and $270,693 claimed in 1993. All three winnings came on the Gopher 5 lottery game.