Powerball jackpot rises to $760 million after no winner Wednesday night

By Elizabeth Wolfe, CNN

(CNN) — An estimated $760 million jackpot will be up for grabs in the next Powerball drawing after no winning ticket was drawn Wednesday night.

The lottery’s next drawing will be Saturday at 10:59 p.m. ET.

After more than two months with no grand prize winner, the jackpot now carries a lump-sum option estimated at $382.5 million.

But Wednesday’s drawing didn’t leave everyone empty-handed. At least one ticket in Texas won $2 million and at least one other in California won $1 million, the lottery announced.

Wednesday’s jackpot was initially set at an estimated $685 million but sales officials increased the prize by about $15 million due to strong ticket sales.

The swelling prize is the fourth Powerball jackpot to exceed half a billion dollars this year.

The Powerball jackpot was last won on October 11, when a ticket in California won a $1.765 billion grand prize. The odds of winning the grand prize are 1 in 292,201,338, according to Powerball. Tickets cost $2 per play and are sold in 45 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands.

Meanwhile, the person who bought the winningest ticket in the nation’s other big-jackpot multistate lottery – Mega Millions – may never be known publicly.

The official winner of that game’s $1.6 billion jackpot, drawn in August, is a limited liability company called Saltines Holdings, LLC, the Florida Lottery announced Wednesday. The recipient is set to get a lump-sum payment of more than $794 million and can stay anonymous through the LLC.

CNN’s Brammhi Balarajan and Sarah Engel contributed to this report.

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