Powerball to expand to UK as jackpot game goes global in shocking new deal

Powerball is jumping the pond.The lottery game that has made millionaires in the US will expand this summer to include players in England, Scotland and other parts of the UK.An agreement was announced Tuesday between the Multi-State Lottery Association, which runs the lottery game, and Allwyn UK, which operates the UK’s National Lottery.The deal still must be approved by a UK gambling commission.It will mark the first time a lottery outside the US will contribute to the Powerball jackpot.“We’re constantly looking for ways to make sure that we’re keeping Powerball culturally and commercially relevant,” said Matt Strawn, who heads Powerball and is chief executive of the Iowa Lottery.

“And this really is the next natural progression in doing just that.”The same jackpot amount will be available to players on both sides of the Atlantic with US payouts in dollars and those in the UK in pounds.For players in the US, nothing changes, including the $2 cost of a Powerball ticket and the long odds of winning the jackpot of 1 in 292.2 million, Strawn said.But with UK players buying tickets, a larger player pool will grow jackpots more quickly.“Players consistently tell us in survey after survey that faster growing Powerball jackpots is what they’d like to see,” Strawn said.“Not surprisingly, the higher the jackpots grow the more people play the game in a particular drawing.

The more people play, the higher sales grow.The higher sales grow, the higher the jackpots get, the more people play.”For UK players, Powerball will offer a chance at much larger jackpots than are now available at lotteries in the country and Europe.The largest Powerball payout was just over $2 billion from a ticket bought in 2022 in California.

EuroMillions, a lottery offered across nine European countries and also operated in the UK by Allwyn, paid the biggest prize to a UK player of £195 million ($265 million) in 2022.“Our ambition is to bring more games, more innovation an...