Another California lottery player – another big jackpot winner.
Officials on Friday identified the Californian who won the $1.08bn Powerball jackpot last year, satisfying a requirement under state law.
Yanira Alvarez won what was Powerball’s third-largest jackpot ever after buying a ticket at Las Palmitas Mini Market in downtown Los Angeles, officials revealed. Her name was publicly released a little more than a year after Edwin Castro, a Powerball player also from California, was identified as having taken home the world’s largest ever lottery prize: $2.04bn.
And it was days after a group of Californians was revealed to be the winner of another jackpot exceeding $1bn in a separate lottery.
Alvarez’s winning numbers were 7, 10, 11, 13, 24 and the red Powerball 24.
In California, jackpot winners have the option of claiming the winnings over 30 annual payments or a cash value of the prize upfront. Alvarez opted for the latter, which amounted to $558.1m before federal taxes.
She declined any additional comments in officials’ announcement of her name.
Alvarez’s win ended a 39-draw jackpot run without a winner for Powerball. And it was the first of two back-to-back billion-dollar winning tickets sold in California, according to the state lottery. The second win occurred last October when a group of people won the $1.76bn jackpot via a ticket purchased at Midway Market in Frazier Park, California.
Earlier in March, the California Lottery identified Theodorus Struyck as the representative of the group of winners.
Hailing the winnings, the California Lottery said: “Both historic Powerball sequences produced one other big winner in California: public education. The California Lottery’s sole mission is to raise supplemental funding for public schools, including K-12 and higher education.
“Last year’s back-to-back giant jackpot sequences resulted in an estimated $197.9 million in additional funding for schools.”
California Lottery director Harjinder K Shergill Chima said in a statement: “We can’t thank our players enough for their help in supporting California’s public schools. Our mission is what drives us every day, and while jackpot prizes change lives for the big winners, they’re also making an important difference in the lives of students and teachers in classrooms across the state.”
For his part, Castro – who won in 2022 – opted to take the immediate $997.6m in cash value. In turn, he purchased a five-bedroom, six-bathroom mansion worth $25.5 million in Los Angeles’s Hollywood Hills.
With Powerball’s next drawing scheduled for Saturday, the game’s jackpot is now estimated at $935m, making it the fifth-largest prize in the history of that particular lottery and its biggest advertised jackpot so far this year. Its estimated cash value is $452.3m.
Powerball tickets are $2 per play and are sold in 45 states, Washington DC, Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands. The odds of winning the jackpot are vanishingly thin at 1 in 292.2m.
But it hasn’t been long since someone overcame long odds to win a comparably large prize. This past Tuesday, a person in New Jersey won a $1.13bn jackpot from the Mega Millions multistate lottery.
