Winning Powerball Ticket Sold in Nebraska

Monday, February 20, 2006 posted 02:40 AM EST

At least one person bought a winning ticket for Saturday's record $365 million Powerball lottery jackpot, officials said.

A winning ticket was sold Lincoln, Neb., the Nebraska Lottery reported. It wasn't known late Saturday whether other winning tickets were sold in other states.

The chances of winning the jackpot by matching all six numbers were 1 in 146.1 million. The winning numbers drawn Saturday night were 15-17-43-44-48 and Powerball 29.

People with dreams of winning the record jackpot stood in lengthening lines Saturday to buy tickets that flew out of machines at dizzying speeds.

"I figure somebody is going to win it, so it might as well be me," said Casey Symonds of Omaha, Neb., after buying $25 worth of tickets for himself and four co-workers Friday.

The Powerball jackpot topped the previous lottery record, which was $363 million for the Big Game the forerunner of Mega Millions. That was won by two ticket holders in Illinois and Michigan in 2000.

Powerball's previous record of $340 million was won by an Oregon family in October.

West Virginia retailers cranked out tickets at a rate of 29 per second on Friday, said Libby White, the lottery's marketing director. North Carolina and Virginia residents called the West Virginia lottery asking for directions to the closest retailer, she said.

Sales in South Carolina reached $11,000 a minute on Friday, "pretty staggering," said John C.B. Smith, chairman of the state's lottery commission.

The big buyers usually are people representing pools of co-workers, and some bought hundreds of tickets at a time, said Hope Travers, clerk at a 7-Eleven in Providence, R.I.

"They've been driving me nutty," she said.

But with that much money on the line, sometimes the pool buyers ask for separate tickets on the side, said Bruce Rogers, owner of Kevin's Corner Smoke Shop in downtown Providence.

"I say 'What are you going to do, leave everyone else out?' They say 'Yeah, I'd do it in a heartbeat,'" he said.

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