You drove out of your way to hit the convenience store that seems “lucky.” You did a little Googling over the weekend to see how much a yacht costs — nothing too fancy, maybe a 55-footer. And like Charlie in “Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory,” you are holding tightly to your golden ticket.
You, my friend, have Powerball Fever.
So does just about everyone. With no winning number drawn in Saturday night’s record $949.8 million Powerball drawing, the next jackpot drawing on Wednesday night could reach an estimated $1.3 billion, lottery officials said.
“Biggest jackpot in the history of the world. Absolutely confirmed,” Texas Lottery executive director Gary Grief told Fox News. The amount is so big, many billboards around the country simply can’t display that many zeros.
Why do we play this lottery game? Maybe for the sheer fun of it, and the sense of camaraderie we average joes enjoy during our daydreams of tossing wads of cash in the air and not having a worry in the world.
“I love the excitement playing brings — everyone is talking about it, and it’s fun,” one 76-year-old woman standing in line at a Boston-area convenience store told LifeZette. “I normally don’t play, but it’s fun to contemplate the idea of ‘what if.’”
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The excitement we feel when playing the lottery may also be that little chemical in our brains called dopamine.
“When we engage in an activity that keeps us alive or helps us pass on our genes, neurons in the reward system squirt out a chemical messenger called dopamine, giving us a little wave of satisfaction,” according to a November 2013 article in Scientific American, explaining the chemical interplay that occurs when we roll the dice.
A study by Patrick Anselme and Mike J.F. Robinson published in Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience, the online publication of the NIH, reports that dopamine was released to a larger extent in pathological gamblers than it was in the healthy control group during recorded gambling episodes.
But money isn’t everything — for those who love to gamble.
Related: Powerball Jackpot Soars to $1.3 Billion
“Although the traditional view is in agreement with neuroscientific data, it fails to explain why people often describe gambling as a pleasant activity rather than as an opportunity to gain money,” the study continues.
“During gambling episodes, pathological gamblers report euphoric feelings comparable to those experienced by drug users, and the more pathological gamblers lose money, the more they tend to persevere in this activity—a phenomenon referred to as loss-chasing.”
That euphoria is the dopamine effect.
Whatever the reason, people can’t drink enough from the Powerball punch bowl.
“They’re not just selling tickets, they’re selling a fantasy,” said one Monday morning caller named “Bill” to WRKO radio station in Boston. “Maybe I can have that Rolls Royce convertible, and that big luxury apartment downtown.”
Bill also related that his wife won $4 in a recent drawing … and that’s about it.
According to Powerball officials, anyone who buys a single ticket has a 1-in-292 million chance of winning in Wednesday night’s drawing.
“Powerball capitalizes on the fact that that number is very hard to comprehend,” Jeffrey Miecznikowski, an associate professor in the University of Buffalo’s Department of Biostatistics, told ABC News.
“The probability or the odds of winning the lottery are the equivalent of flipping a coin 28 times and getting heads every time for those 28 flips. And that doesn’t sound too bad — 28 is much smaller than 292 million — so it gives you an idea of how rare getting a head 28 times in a row is,” he added.
Gary Grief of the Texas Lottery told ABC News on Sunday he was surprised to see the results of Saturday night’s lottery drawing. He said 25 players won a $1 million prize and three others won a $2 million prize.
Compare that to the mega-prize: If you win Wednesday night’s Powerball jackpot, you will pocket (approximately) a cool $806 million.
To win the jackpot, all six numbers must be correct. The first five can be in any order, but the sixth must be the Powerball number.
About 70 percent of past winners used Quick Picks, the computer system that spits out numbers, according to the official Powerball website.
Dreamers everywhere will be checking their tickets Wednesday night. And there’s still plenty of time to buy more.
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