Earl Littleton gets $15 in Powerball tickets Tuesday at the Interstate 7 gas station in Delta. Littleton, who lives in Pickens, drove to Louisiana just to try his luck at getting the $137 million.(Jon Giffin The Vicksburg Post)

[12/24/03]DELTA A lull came Tuesday afternoon, but the manager of Interstate No. 7 here expected sales of Powerball lottery tickets to return to the numbers recorded around noon, and for today to be even busier.

The grand prize for the multistate lottery is projected to be $137 million in an annuity or $74.4 million in cash before taxes if a single ticket matches all the numbers drawn at 10 tonight.

No one has won the Powerball grand prize since Oct. 25, and when that happens, the prize continues to grow until a winning ticket or tickets is drawn. Drawings are Wednesday and Saturday nights, meaning if no winning tickets are picked tonight, the prize will grow even more.

“It has been good, very good,” said Hattie Vines, manager of the Interstate station, one of several outlets just across the river from Vicksburg where several types of lottery tickets are sold. It is not illegal to have a ticket in Mississippi, but there are no lotteries in the state, meaning the east Louisiana outlets get flooded with customers.

“It’s going to get better tomorrow,” said Vines, a veteran of the giant jackpots and the frenzies they start.

Sales always pick up on the day of the drawing, said Kimberly Chopin, Louisiana Lottery Corp. public information manager in Baton Rouge.

Vines said her outlet has been averaging about 15,000 tickets per day for the past couple of days with the heaviest business coming just after noon when people are heading back to work from lunch and around 6 p.m. when they are headed home.

Today, Vines said she will probably sell between 20,000 and 25,000 Powerball tickets.

Chopin said by late Tuesday afternoon more than 707,000 Powerball tickets had been sold by Louisiana Lottery Corp. That compares to the Aug. 30 Powerball when the jackpot was a similar $140 million and more than 2 million tickets were sold.

The Powerball drawing resets to $10 million when it is won, Chopin said, adding this is the fourth time in 2003 that the grand prize went to $100 million. At the estimated level, today’s jackpot will be the ninth highest in Powerball’s history.

With the expected volume of business expected in Delta today, Vines has a word of advice.

“Tell them to come early,” she said, pointing out the Interstate 20 bridge over the Mississippi River is open this year and that’s not an excuse.

Vines said sales of Powerball tickets will be shut down at 9 p.m., and the drawing is at precisely 9:59 p.m.

Winner or not, sales of tickets for Saturday’s Powerball drawing will resume promptly at 10 p.m.

The top prize is won by matching all five numbers (1 to 53) drawn and the powerball (1 to 43). There are lesser prizes, depending on how close to getting all the numbers an entrant gets. For instance, there were 770,912 winners on Saturday, but no one correctly matched all the numbers to win the jackpot.

Sixteen co-workers in a Minnesota school shared half of the Oct. 25 Powerball jackpot. The group includes 15 kitchen workers and one custodian. The group’s single ticket matched all the numbers, as did one other ticket, so they shared the $190.9 million jackpot.

Twenty-five states and the Virgin Islands share the Powerball revenue that is not paid out as prizes or overhead.