Powerball tickets were flying out the door as fast as the Gunnedah Newsagency could print them last week.
The $200 million jackpot – the biggest offered by any Australian lottery game in history – generated big interest across the country and Gunnedah was no exception.
“We’ve been flat out since it went up to $200 million,” Gunnedah Newsagency’s Ellen Sturgess said last Thursday afternoon in the hours before the record draw.
Tickets of almost every combination were purchased including many group tickets from employees hoping to make their fortune overnight.
“We’ve had a lot of work syndicates,” she said.
The odds of winning were slim but still, up to half of Australian adults were expected to have an entry into the draw.
The week prior, when sales peaked nation-wide for the $150 million Powerball draw, lottery agents sold 7445 tickets in a single minute.
When the $200 million draw came around, Gunnedah Times staff pooled a few pennies for one game of the ‘Powerhit’ standard entry. This guaranteed the winning Powerball in the entry.
But alas, the Times’ team did not win the jackpot.
In fact, only two division winners were drawn – one each in Queensland and Singleton – each taking home $100 million in winnings.
Another 22 lucky winners each won $177,092 in division two and a further 406 ticket holders picked up $11,930 each in division three.
In 2023, 122.7 million ticket wins paid out more than $3.76 billion in prize money from various lottery-associated games.
Of the 20 Powerball division one winning entries in 2023, eight landed in New South Wales, seven in Victoria, two each in South Australia and Western Australia, and one in Queensland.
For the record, the winning numbers were 12, 33, 23, 35, 1, 26 and 32. The all-important Powerball number was 10.
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