A Florida Player Just Won $2 Million on Powerball — Without Hitting the Jackpot

Somewhere in Kissimmee, Florida, someone walked into La Caribena Grocery and Restaurant on Buena Ventura Boulevard, bought a Powerball ticket with Power Play for $3, and won $2 million.

Not the $327 million jackpot. Not even close. They matched five white balls — 13, 14, 16, 21, 38 — but missed the Powerball (14). Without Power Play, that's a $1 million prize. With it? Double. Two million dollars, for an extra buck.

A Pennsylvania player matched the same five numbers that night without Power Play. They won $1 million. Same drawing, same five numbers, one million less — because they skipped a checkbox.

This is the story nobody writes about. Everyone watches the jackpot number tick upward. Nobody talks about the second prize that's genuinely life-changing and far more likely to hit.

The Math on That Extra Dollar

Here's how Power Play works: for an additional $1 per play (making your ticket $3 instead of $2), every non-jackpot prize gets multiplied. The multiplier is drawn separately — it can be 2x, 3x, 4x, 5x, or even 10x when the jackpot is under $150 million.

But here's the part that matters: the Match 5 prize is always doubled to $2 million with Power Play, regardless of which multiplier is drawn. Even if the multiplier lands on 2x, your Match 5 goes from $1 million to $2 million. It's essentially a locked-in guarantee on the second-highest prize tier.

For context, Wednesday's Power Play multiplier was just 2x. Every other prize got doubled. But the Match 5 prize always gets doubled. The Florida player's extra dollar turned into an extra $1,000,000. That's a million-to-one return on investment — literally.

The Prizes Nobody Tracks

Everyone knows the Powerball jackpot is $348 million for Saturday's drawing. Very few people can tell you how many $1 million and $2 million winners Powerball produces in a typical year.

The answer might surprise you: Powerball has produced more than 60 Match 5 winners annually in recent years. That's more than one per week. Some of these hit the full $2 million with Power Play. Others take home $1 million without it. And because none of them make the cable news chyron, they're invisible.

Compare that to jackpot winners. Powerball has produced five jackpot winners in all of 2026 so far. Five in six months versus 60+ second-tier winners in a year. The second prize isn't a consolation — it's where the realistic money lives.

The odds of matching five white balls without the Powerball? 1 in 11,688,053. Still long. But that's roughly 25 times more likely than hitting the full jackpot at 1 in 292,201,338. And at $2 million with Power Play, it's genuinely life-altering money.

Curious how those odds translate into actual game value? Check the LuckMaker Score at luckmaker3000.com/games — we rate every game from 0 to 100 so you can compare Powerball against 97 other games across 25 states and 9 international markets.

Mega Millions Has the Same Trick

With Mega Millions at a staggering $489 million for Friday's drawing — the 35th consecutive draw without a jackpot winner — millions of tickets will be sold in the next 24 hours. Most of those players will skip the Megaplier add-on. That's a mistake.

Megaplier works the same way: $1 extra per play. The multiplier can be 2x, 3x, 4x, or 5x (no 10x option for Mega Millions). And the Match 5 prize — normally $1 million — jumps to $2, $3, $4, or $5 million depending on which multiplier is drawn. Unlike Power Play, Megaplier's Match 5 scales with the drawn multiplier, meaning you could win $5 million on a $3 ticket.

Friday's drawing carries jackpot odds of 1 in 302,575,350. The Match 5 odds? 1 in 12,607,306 — about 24 times more likely. If Megaplier pulls a 5x, that's a $5 million second prize.

Before buying your Friday ticket, you can generate your numbers with the Lucky Number Generator. And once the drawing happens, check your numbers at our results page — because as we've covered, $2 billion in prizes go unclaimed every year by people who never check their non-jackpot wins.

Why Most Players Leave Money on the Table

The psychology here is simple: people buy lottery tickets for the jackpot fantasy. The $489 million number is what drives them to the counter. So they mentally frame the ticket as a $489 million bet — and when they don't win $489 million, they throw the ticket away without checking the other eight prize tiers.

This is how you end up with a Florida grocery store printing a $2 million ticket while the nation collectively groans about another drawing without a jackpot winner. The Florida player was paying attention to the whole ticket, not just the top line.

A few things to remember for this weekend's drawings:

1. Add Power Play / Megaplier. For $1 more per play, you're doubling (or more) every single prize below the jackpot. The Match 5 alone justifies it.

2. Check every prize tier. Powerball has nine prize levels. Mega Millions has nine. Match just the Powerball or Mega Ball by itself? That's $4. Match three white balls? $7. These add up — and they fund your next ticket.

3. Know what you'd actually take home. If you hit $2 million with Power Play like the Florida player, federal taxes take 24% off the top immediately — that's $480,000 withheld. Florida has no state income tax, so the Kissimmee winner keeps more than most. Want to run the numbers for your state? Use the Lottery Tax Calculator.

4. Store your tickets digitally. If you don't check your tickets, you can't win what you've already won. Use LuckMaker's Ticket Vault to scan and track every purchase — so nothing slips through the cracks.

This Weekend's Numbers

• Mega Millions (Friday, June 26): $489 million jackpot, $220.9 million cash option. Drawing at 11 PM ET.
• Powerball (Saturday, June 27): $348 million jackpot, $157.5 million cash option. Drawing at 10:59 PM ET.

Combined, that's $837 million across two drawings in 48 hours. Someone's going to win something this weekend. The question isn't whether you'll hit the jackpot — it's whether you'll notice if you hit the second prize.

Don't be the person who throws away a $2 million ticket because it wasn't $348 million.