Anyone who plays the lottery knows that it’s fun to shake things up every once in a while. Not in any huge way, but just enough to make the game a little more interesting. In the past, that might have meant buying a couple extra tickets, or going with a different set of numbers. But when Powerball announced they were rolling out a new option, lottery-players everywhere cracked a collective smile – finally there was a new way to play their favourite game, a feature that didn’t change the game per se, but added an extra layer to it. It’s called “Power Play”
.Before this post gets into Power Play, perhaps it’s best to talk a bit about Powerball in general. After all, for Canadians, gaining the ability to buy Powerball tickets online has been a fairly recent development, and subsequently many Canadians still don’t how to play Powerball. Don’t fret – it’s dead simple. Essentially, you pick five numbers from between 1-69, and one number from 1-26. These two sets are drawn from separate machines, and you win prizes according to how many numbers you matched. Easy, right?
While this basic gameplay is certainly entertaining enough, in 2001 Powerball introduced what it called the Power Play option, much to player’s delight. Here’s how it works. First off, you choose the Power Play option on your Powerball card, paying just a little bit extra. With the Power Play option activated, you have the chance of multiplying your prize (should you win one) by 2x, 3x, 4x, 5x, or 10x. The size of the multiplier is based on its own draw.
So, for instance, if you choose to activate Power Play, and a 5x multiplier is drawn, and let’s say you match four numbers – instead of winning $100, you win $500. This doesn’t, unfortunately, apply to the jackpot (i.e. you can’t win 5x the jackpot) so players mainly use the Power Play option to increase their smaller prizes. And, of course, the multiplier draw is a fun draw in its own right, since you never know before you start the factor by which your prizes might be multiplied.
Since there quite a few players who set aside a very fixed amount of money for playing Powerball, the question boils down to whether it’s better to put money towards Power Play and hopefully multiply your smaller prizes, or whether that money is better served going to another ticket, where you might have another chance of winning big. This is a debate that seems ongoing in the Powerball playing community online, but what really matters is personal preference. As mentioned, Power Play doesn’t change the game as much as it adds to it, and it can fun to try the option every once in a while.
Canadians new to the world of Powerball are encouraged to try out all the options and see what they like best. Now that it’s as easy as clicking a mouse a few times to buy Powerball tickets online, you might as well start experimenting with the game. You could even end up multiplying a million dollar winning – that’s the beauty of the Powerball lottery.