One Powerball Drawing Made 18 Millionaires in New Jersey — And 3 Still Don't Know It

On April 29, the Powerball jackpot was worth $143.4 million, split between winners in Kansas and Indiana. That's the headline most outlets ran with. But something far stranger happened in New Jersey that night — and the state lottery is still waiting for it to fully play out.

That single drawing produced 18 second-tier winners in New Jersey alone. Fourteen tickets matched five numbers for $1 million each. Four of those players had added the $1 Power Play option, bumping their prizes to $2 million. Nationwide, the drawing created 89 second-tier winners total, meaning New Jersey — one state — accounted for 20% of all million-dollar tickets in a game played across 45 states plus D.C.

It's now been five weeks. Fifteen winners have claimed. Three million-dollar tickets are still out there, uncollected.

Check if you're holding a winner at luckmaker3000.com/results.

The Math Behind the Madness

Let's address the obvious question: how does one state pull 18 millionaires from one drawing?

Powerball's second-tier odds — matching all five white balls but missing the red Powerball — are 1 in 11,688,053 per ticket. Those are long odds for any individual player, but lottery math is a volume game. New Jersey is the 11th most populous state with about 9.3 million residents, and it consistently ranks in the top five for per-capita lottery spending.

On a night with a $143 million jackpot, ticket sales surge. Powerball doesn't release state-level sales data per drawing, but industry estimates suggest New Jersey alone likely generated 8-12 million ticket combinations for that draw (many players buy multiple lines). At that volume, the expected number of second-tier winners in the state would be roughly 0.7 to 1.0.

Getting 18 when you'd expect around one? That's a statistical outlier of extraordinary magnitude — roughly an 18-sigma event if the tickets were all independent random selections. Which tells us something important: they weren't.

Many of those 18 tickets likely played the same popular number combination. When a "hot" set of numbers happens to match five of six, every ticket with that combination wins. It's the same phenomenon that causes prize pools to split among dozens of jackpot winners when popular numbers hit — except at the second tier, there's no splitting. Every matching ticket pays the full $1 million (or $2 million with Power Play).

This is exactly why our Lucky Number Generator exists. Random selections avoid the clustering problem that concentrates wins on popular dates and patterns — and avoids the splitting problem if you actually hit the jackpot.

The Winners' Stories Are Better Than the Numbers

The New Jersey Lottery has been releasing winner profiles in batches, and the stories read like a screenwriter's pitch meeting.

The Dream Player. One winner had a vivid dream about winning the lottery, complete with specific numbers. They played those numbers the next morning — and lost. The play slip sat on a dresser for six months until it fell off during a move. On impulse, they played the same numbers again. This time: $1 million.

The Stubborn Husband. Another winner had been playing the same numbers for years while their spouse begged them to switch. "My wife kept telling me to pick new numbers," the winner said. They refused. Those numbers hit on April 29 — with Power Play added, the prize doubled to $2 million.

The Karma Believer. A winner who picked numbers based on their birthday described the prize as "karma for a really good deed." The $1 million is going toward paying off their home.

Each of these stories has something in common: persistence. Whether it was stubborn number loyalty, an old dream revisited, or years of consistent play, the winners who've come forward weren't one-time impulse buyers.

Three Tickets, Zero Claims

Here's where it gets tense. Three $1 million tickets sold in New Jersey for the April 29 drawing have not been claimed. Winners have one year from the draw date — meaning the clock runs out on April 29, 2027. That sounds like plenty of time, but history says otherwise.

Unclaimed prizes are shockingly common. In 2025 alone, over $2.5 billion in U.S. lottery prizes went unclaimed — tickets lost, forgotten, or never checked. We've covered this problem before: New Jersey had a $59 million ticket nearly expire just last month when a winner found it in their pants pocket days before the deadline.

Three million-dollar tickets means $3 million is sitting in a drawer, a glovebox, or a jacket pocket somewhere in New Jersey right now.

The fix is simple: check your tickets. Every time. Even old ones. Especially old ones. Save them digitally in your Ticket Vault at luckmaker3000.com so nothing slips through the cracks.

What This Means for Tonight's Powerball

The Powerball jackpot tonight sits at an estimated $194 million after no one matched all six numbers in Monday's drawing. The Mega Millions pot has also rolled to approximately $370 million for Friday — the 24th consecutive drawing without a jackpot winner.

Combined, that's over half a billion dollars in play this week across both games.

Want to know which game gives you the best shot right now? Check the LuckMaker Score at luckmaker3000.com/games — it updates after every drawing and factors in current jackpot size, odds, ticket price, and tax implications for your state.

Whether you're stubborn enough to play the same numbers forever or trust the randomness of our Lucky Number Generator, the only guaranteed way to lose is to never check your ticket.

Three people in New Jersey can confirm that.

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Use our Lottery Tax Calculator to see what a $1 million or $2 million Powerball prize actually pays in your state after federal and state withholding.