Powerball jackpot hits staggering $100 million

IT’S NOT over yet for Powerball players, with the prize jackpotting to a staggering $100 million next week.

Thursday night got off to a shaky start as lengthy delays due to a technical glitch with the draw led to an agonising wait for ticket holders.

Eventually, the winning numbers for last night’s $80 million jackpot prize were announced: 3, 10, 7, 28, 34, 24, 31 with a Powerball number of 14.

However, there were no division one winners, meaning the Powerball division one prize will hit the $100 million mark for the second time in less than six months.

In good news for Powerball punters, the game has now jackpotted for the eighth consecutive week and is the equal largest prize in the game’s 23year history.

If one single entry takes home the entire $100 million jackpot next week, it would be the biggest Australian lottery prize ever won by a single entry.

Despite there being no division one winners, a total of 2,467,864 prizes worth more than $44.1 million were won in divisions two to nine.

The numbers were expected to be available online by about 9 o’clock on Thursday night and be televised about 9.30pm on Channel 7.

But the Lott posted to its website about 10.45pm that it was continuing to finalise the draw.

The post came almost two hours after results were due to be revealed.

Organisers blamed the high number of entries, with the whopping prizemoney prompting millions of games to be entered late on Thursday.

The numbers were eventually announced during Channel 7 news, explaining the delay was caused by a technical glitch on Powerball’s end.

Last year 14 division one winning entries took home $344 million in Powerball prizes.

While it stresses that the Powerball is a “random game of chance” and “every number has an equal chance of being drawn”, the Lott has still unveiled the game’s most frequently drawn numbers of the past couple of months.

For the main barrel, where seven winning numbers are drawn from 34, the “hot” number is 32, having been drawn a total of 13 times. The second “hot” number is 29, which was drawn 12 times.

For the “cold” winning numbers, 1, 10, 11, 12, 21 and 27 made the most appearances, each being drawn four times.

“Hot” Powerball numbers include 3, 13 and 19, again each drawn four times, and the “cold” 1, 2, 4 and 18 for the “cold”, which weren’t drawn at all.