With a staggering sum of luck, Martin Lopez will wake up Christmas morning a very rich man.
Lopez, who works at a concrete plant in Dallas, stopped at a QuikTrip off Interstate 30 Tuesday afternoon to buy a stack of Powerball tickets to split with co-workers.
A few dollars buys Lopez a chance to dream big, like really big. The Powerball jackpot has soared to $1.7 billion, a mind-boggling amount of money for most of us. The drawing is set for Christmas Eve.
Like many Powerball hopefuls, Lopez said he would pay off debt and buy a house and car with his riches. Others said they would take a vacation, give money to their families and never work again.
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“If God blesses me with this money,” Lopez said, “I will do good with it.”
If someone wins Wednesday, it would be the fourth-largest prize in the game’s history. A winner would get to choose between the jackpot amount, paid out in 29 annual payments, or a one-time lump sum of about $781 million.
This would not be the first Christmas Eve win. A lucky winner nabbed a Christmas Eve jackpot in 2011. Four people have won on Christmas Day, in 1996, 2002, 2010 and 2013.
The odds of winning the jackpot are 1 in 292.2 million. To put that into perspective, you are more likely to be attacked by a shark (1 in 11.5 million), be struck by lightning (1 in 1,171,000) or score a hole-in-one as an amateur golfer (1 in 12,500).
Long odds did not deter people at a 7-Eleven in West Dallas, where the line at one point wrapped around a nearby food counter, said Ricardo Velasquez, a clerk. Many people purchased tickets to stuff into Christmas stockings.
“Everyone is buying them,” said Velasquez, wearing a cheery red and green sweater. “Everyone could use the money.”
Among the hopeful players was Jason Johnson, who works in real estate. Johnson said he typically plays only when the jackpot soars. If he won, he said, he would buy a new house, invest and travel.
“Somebody eventually has to win,” he said, adding that it might as well be him.
Most ticket buyers, including Johnson, said they would keep their new wealth private. Texas allows lottery winners to remain anonymous if they win $1 million or more.
No one has matched all six numbers since Sept. 6, when two ticket holders in Texas and Missouri split nearly $1.8 billion. The winning ticket in Texas was sold at a gas station-convenience store in Fredericksburg.
The largest Powerball jackpot in history was $2 billion, with the winning ticket sold in 2022 at a service station in Altadena, Calif., just north of Pasadena.
Maria Collazo, a custodian, bought five tickets Tuesday at a QuikTrip on Hemphill Street in Fort Worth. If she wins, Collazo said, she would give half the money to her family and half to help the community.
The Jackpot would be nice, Collazo said, but so would a much more modest prize.
“I would take $1 million,” she said. “That’s plenty.”