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The U.S. Powerball lottery is holding a drawing this week for a jackpot that’s already reached US$1.5 billion. That’s after the 18 drawings held since November failed to yield a winner, causing the grand prize to swell to this record sum.

This jackpot is drawing such attention that more people are buying tickets, and even the lottery’s own projections are changing rapidly. During the weekend the payout was an estimated US$1.3 billion. Monday it was revised to US$1.4 billion and on Tuesday it hit US$1.5 billion.

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That makes it the largest lottery grand prize the world has ever seen, even compared with the “El Gordo” lottery in Spain, which in December awarded a larger cache of prizes ($2.4 billion) but spread it among thousands of winners.

The odds of winning this huge sum of money on January 13 are very small (1 in 292 million). You are 250 times more likely to be hit by lightning. If every adult in the U.S. purchased just one ticket, each with a different number, there would still be a good chance (about 15 percent) that no winner would arise and the pot would grow even larger.