A poorly timed phone call from a friend ended with good news for two Missouri Lottery players who had purchased a Powerball ticket together in Clay County.
“My buddy calls me up and says, ‘Hey, you got a minute?’” one of the players recalled. “I’m like, ‘I’m in the middle of a video game; I can’t pause. What’s up?’
“He said, ‘No, you’re going to want to get off for this.’ So I was like, ‘Alright, this is serious now,’” he laughed. “He asked me to check the winning numbers on the (Missouri Lottery) website.”
It was worth pausing his game to see the Powerball ticket they’d purchased at Price Chopper, 896 S. Highway 291 in Liberty, was the winner of a $50,000 Double Play prize in the Dec. 2 drawing.
Thanks to their decision to add the Double Play feature to their ticket, their original Powerball numbers had also been entered in the Double Play drawing held after the main Powerball drawing. It was in that second drawing that their ticket matched four of the five white-ball numbers drawn, plus the Powerball. The winning Double Play numbers on Dec. 2 were 14, 27, 34, 39 and 40, and a Powerball number of 4.
“I was like, ‘Bro, did we just…? Yeah, we did!” he chuckled. “My buddy now calls me Richie Rich.”
In FY24, players in Clay County won more than $29.6 million in Missouri Lottery prizes, retailers received more than $3.1 million in commissions and bonuses, and more than $10 million in Lottery proceeds went to education programs in the county.
