Powerball jackpot jumps to $500 million

Players can win an estimated $500 million in the largest Powerball jackpot in nearly a year. 

The Georgia Lottery said the increase from $450 million to $500 million is due to brisk ticket sales. Powerball offers two jackpot payment options: the $500 million prize paid over 29 years in graduated payments, or the cash option of approximately $306 million.

Tickets are $2 per play. You can buy tickets for the drawing until 10 p.m. Wednesday.

If there is no winner after Wednesday night's drawing, the prize will continue to climb.

The jackpot will be the largest since a Powerball prize that climbed to $564.1 million last February before it was won by players from North Carolina, Texas and Puerto Rico.

HOW DOES THE JACKPOT RANK?

The jackpot would be the sixth-largest ever in North America. It's been growing since the last Powerball jackpot winner on Nov. 4 and will keep climbing if no one wins the big prize on Wednesday. If there isn't a jackpot winner, the prize for Saturday's drawing would be significantly larger, but it would still take some time to grow beyond the record. That was a $656 million Mega Millions jackpot won in March 2012. The largest Powerball prize was a $590.5 million jackpot won by a Florida woman in May 2013.

THE ODDS? NOT GOOD.

The odds are one in 292.2 million, which means you're really, really, really unlikely to win. For some comparison, your chance of being struck by lightning in a year is about one in 960,000. But as lottery officials often note, you have no chance of winning if you don't buy a ticket.

POOLING YOUR MONEY

Some players feel they increase their odds of winning by pooling their money with co-workers, with a promise to split the winnings. Joining with colleagues and friends can increase the fun of playing, but the odds of winning are so tiny that adding 50 or 100 chances doesn't matter much. Lottery officials recommend that if people pool their money, they put down rules in writing for splitting the prize, as it's easy for misunderstandings to crop up when hundreds of millions of dollars are at stake.

The Georgia Lottery says players should always check their tickets. Each year, $800 million lottery prizes go uncollected.