Here is a look at some of the biggest winners in the history of the South African Powerball.
You’ll also get a look at the odds of winning the SA Powerball jackpot in comparison to other lotteries around the world.
The biggest SA Powerball win, ever, is the R232 million clinched in February 2019. It was won by a man in Cape Town after two dozen rollovers. From the penultimate draw to the last, the main prize climbed by R20 million. The winner waited for more than a week before stepping forward to claim his prize. Talk about becoming one of the richest people in the country, literally, overnight.
A man from Ballito in KwaZulu-Natal won R167 million via the SA Powerball in 2022. As an avid golfer and fan of beach walks, he had no big plans to make any changes to his quiet life. He wanted to settle some debts, make a few investments and give some money to charity.
R158 million went the way of a woman from North West in July 2021. She used her ABSA banking app for the entry and spent a mere R15. Now that’s an outstanding return on investment. She had lost her job, so the timing of the massive win was spot on. She planned to take her family on a seaside holiday – and build and furnish a new home.
The SA Powerball went almost two years without a jackpot winner before, in August 2018, a34-year-old person bought a winning ticket in Mpumalanga. R145 million was the main prize – wow. The winner said he locked his ticket in a safe until he could confirm he was, indeed, the lucky winner. Just think how many safes he could buy with R145 million.
The odds of winning the SA Powerball jackpot are about one in 42 million. For context, there are about 60 million people in South Africa – not that they all enter the Powerball. These main prize odds are smaller than some of the other global lotteries such as the US Powerball or MegaMillions, but there are other draws around the world with attractive main prize odds.
Take, for instance, the Swedish Lotto. The odds of winning a main prize in that draw are less than one in seven million. The Australian Lotto, Irish Lotto, and Polish Lotto weigh in at main prize odds of one in 8 million, one in 11 million and one in 14 million, respectively.
For those into cryptocurrency, you might be interested to know the chances of winning the Bitcoin Lottery’s main prize are also one in 14 million.
And there’s the German Lotto and French Lotto jackpots odds at one in 16 million and one in 19 million, respectively.
Those global lotteries are quite appealing with their smaller main prize odds. For South Africans with one eye on up and down exchange rates, they’re all the more attractive because if won, the conversion to rands can be quite lucrative. The SA Powerball is won in rands and paid out in rands. Other global draws take into account dollars, pounds and euros.
