Powerball lottery player Cinnamon Reeves-Davis from New Orleans recently went into her local lottery store to buy her usual Powerball tickets, however instead of handing her a newly printed ticket straight out of the lottery machine the store assistant handed her a pre-printed ticket out of a drawer from under the counter. Well pierce my ears and call me Drafty – if that’s not a new variation of the “here’s one I prepared earlier” ploy – then I don’t know what is!

After a verbal dust-up with the assistant during which Reeves-Davis demands for a freshly printed ticket were refused, she decided to take her business elsewhere. According to lottery officials a store can sell any valid ticket no matter when it was printed — just so long as it’s not for a previous drawing; however, buyers do have the right to refuse any ticket that they don’t want.

Apparently it’s a short term problem to do with the newly beefed up Powerball draw which came into play on Jan. 15, with some players, still unaware of the Powerball revamp believing that the store is selling them the wrong tickets and subsequently refusing the sale, which then leaves printed and now unsold tickets at the counter which the store then tries to sell on.

You can play Powerball as well as many other of the world’s biggest and richest lotteries right here at WinTrillions.

Divination is the art of foretelling the future or the discovery of hidden knowledge usually by the interpretation of omens or by the aid of supernatural powers. Just in case you reckon you need all the help you can get to pick a lottery winning line and feel that divination might be the next best thing since sliced bread, here’s a few methods you might like to try!

Toss a coin, throw dice, pick cards from a playing card deck; even bibliomancy. This is the system of using your favourite book or even the Bible to pick your numbers – the method is simple – just open the book to any page and then use numbers found on that page. Bernie Bobowicz of Clifton, New Jersey was going through his mother’s old Bible and saw some numbers. Then he got a funny feeling — a voice inside telling him to play those numbers. He won $7 million in the New York Lotto.

Unfortunately divination didn’t seem to help any Powerball players over the weekend as nobody matched 5 – 33 – 41 – 54 – 59 and Powerball 13 or they would now be $120 million richer; that said 3 players did grab ONE MILLION bucks each by matching 5 mains and another 37 players raked in TEN grand apiece by matching 4 mains and the Powerball.

No outright winner means only one thing – another rollover! The next Powerball draw will be played on Wednesday Feb, 1 and to whet your appetite for divination the jackpot has now climbed to ONE HUNDRED and SEVENTY MILLION dollars ($170,000,000) now that’s enough to cover your stay at the brand new Shahi Mahal Presidential Suite at Raj Palace, Jaipur, India for the next 4,250 nights (food extra)!

The only drawback to making your reservation at the Shahi Mahal is you probably need to win the jackpot first and to win that – you’ll need a ticket; however you don’t have to be a divination guru to know that you can buy your ticket for the next Powerball draw from right here at WinTrillions where you can also buy tickets for many other of the world’s biggest and richest lotteries!

Queue dramatic cliff-hanger music – location; Iowa Lottery Headquarters – background plot – less than 2 hours to spare before the claim deadline of 4 p.m. Dec. 29, 2011 was due expire, New York attorney’s acting on behalf an unnamed winners trust finally made it to the Iowa Lottery offices to stake their multi-million dollar Hot Lotto jackpot claim with a ticket bought from a petrol station in Des Moines, Iowa, USA, for the game drawn on Dec. 29, 2010.

Fast forward to last week’s meeting with Iowa Lottery investigators – the claimants lawyers refuse to answer ANY questions about the ticket’s ownership and are given until 3 p.m. today (Friday Jan. 27, 2012) to reveal the true identity of the winner or winners or the multi-million dollar Hot Lotto jackpot payment will be refused.

Wow – a standoff big style, just wait until Hollywood gets onto this – the streets outside Iowa Lottery headquarters emptying faster than a shot dog through a barn, people diving for cover, the two protagonists eye-ball to eye-ball, (queue “musical pocket watch music” – as played in the movie For a Few Dollars More) in readiness for the 3 p.m. shootout – who blinks first – loses!

The outcome: the New York attorney blinks first – withdraws his claim by fax and agrees to “take no further action to enforce the claim.”

The twist: in order to ensure the integrity of the lottery, Iowa Lottery CEO Terry Rich, asks the Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation and the Iowa Attorney General to investigate the attorney who made the original claim as it needs to know just how the law firm obtained the ticket to make sure it wasn’t stolen and that a valid player bought it and whether those involved complied with state law.

What happens to the unclaimed loot? It now goes into the pot toward future prizes! Phew – be still my beating heart!

Peace of mind: whenever you buy your lottery tickets at WinTrillions you won’t ever have to worry about missing a prize deadline, dropping a result, losing your ticket or having it stolen, as we write your name across every ticket, email you with a scanned copy, keep it safely and securely on your behalf, check your numbers and help you with the claim process when you win!

Here’s something to get you thinking: if you lose a hundred bucks you’ll probably feel a bit hacked off; however should you WIN a hundred you’ll no doubt feel pretty good! Now the problem is this; if you’ve just lost the $100 the feelings you have about losing it, hack you off TWICE AS MUCH as any excitement you feel from winning the $100! Is that heavy, or what? This phenomenon is known universally as “loss aversion!”

Still need to be convinced? Toss a coin – heads you win a $100; tails you lose a $100. If you’re not comfortable with a straight 50 / 50, win / lose choice, then decide the biggest amount you ARE comfortable losing? To measure your degree of loss aversion, just divide $100 by your chosen amount.

Now that’s pretty much what we do whenever we decide to buy a lottery ticket, except we don’t do it scientifically! Most of us would probably be very uncomfortable about buying one million greenbacks worth of lottery tickets on the possibility of winning a multi-million jackpot, always assuming you had a spare million in the first place, but will quite readily spend one dollar on a lottery ticket to win the same jackpot, simply because one dollar is what we ARE comfortable with. Sociologists and anthropologists reckon loss aversion has helped humans survive in earlier environments, when the opportunity for gain by hunting down mega-beasts to eat was perceived to be far greater that any potential danger arising from the hunt itself!

So there we have it – if ever proof was needed – playing the lottery is obviously in our human DNA – so what are you waiting for? Never mind “mega-beasts” there are some “mega-million” jackpots up for grabs this very week, including Powerball, Super Enalotto, Indiana Hoosier, and EuroMillions with a collective total of TWO HUNDRED AND EIGHT SEVEN MILLION dollars between them, and that’s just from 4 lotteries – the only requisite is a ticket and you can get one of those right here at WinTrillions, where you can play the world’s biggest and richest lotteries, without ever leaving your personal comfort zone or having to hunt down or be eaten by a mega-beast!