If You Had Played These Numbers
Pick five whites and a Powerball. We play your ticket against every draw since the October 2015 format change and show you the receipts — every hit, every prize, every dry spell.
How it works
The simulation. At $2 per play × 1,339 draws since October 7, 2015, we tally every matching combination against Powerball's prize tiers. Prizes are the un-multiplied base amounts (Power Play would multiply the fixed tiers, but not the jackpot, and adds $1 per ticket — we use the $2 / base-prize version for clarity).
Prize structure. Match 5 + PB is the jackpot (variable, $20M–$2B+). All other tiers are fixed: $1M for 5, $50K for 4+PB, $100 for 4 or 3+PB, $7 for 3 or 2+PB, $4 for 1+PB or PB-only. Anything less wins nothing. Overall odds of any prize are roughly 1-in-25 per ticket.
Expected outcome. A $2 ticket has an expected non-jackpot return of about $0.32 — a baseline ROI around −84%. Your actual result will vary a few percentage points around that, mostly driven by whether you happen to hit a $100 or $50K tier once across a decade. “Winning” at Powerball means hitting the jackpot; every other tier is a rounding error against the steady $2-per-draw outflow.
What we can't compute. Historical jackpot values aren't in our dataset, so if your picks hit 5+PB we flag the draw date but don't assign a dollar value. The headline prize on any given draw was whatever it was that week. This also means ROI excludes jackpot hits.