DES MOINES, Iowa (CNN) -- The record Powerball prize of nearly $300 million is all going to just one lucky player, officials announced Thursday. The winning ticket, purchased at a Speedway gas station in Richmond, Indiana, has the numbers 8, 39, 43, 45, 49, and Powerball 13.
Richmond is in east-central Indiana, near the border of Ohio, a non-Powerball state.
The jackpot -- officially $295.7 million -- kept growing Wednesday as optimists all across the United States lined up to buy a tiny chance for a huge payoff.
Whoever bought the winning ticket chose the lump-sum option, meaning the actual prize awarded will be about $161.5 million before taxes rather than $11.8 million a year paid over 25 years.
The winner has 180 days to claim their prize.
Players must decide in advance whether to take the prize as an annuity or in a single lump sum.
'Difficult numbers to pick'
"We certainly expected two or three (winning tickets). But this stuff happens," said Chuck Strutt, executive director of the Iowa-based Multi-State Lottery Association, which oversees the game.
Strutt said that the winning numbers drawn Wednesday night in a television studio in Des Moines, Iowa, were "difficult for human beings to pick."
"Human beings tend to pick numbers that mean something to them -- birthdays, which would of course be 31 or less -- and things like that," he said.
The Powerball numbers were drawn late Wednesday night at a television studio in Des Moines, Iowa
Powerball too big?
As customers in Washington, D.C., and the 20 states that play Powerball snapped up $210.8 million worth of tickets for the drawing, Powerball's inventor questioned whether it had gotten too big.
"It's not appropriate that we allow people to spend six hours or 10 hours in line to buy a ticket," said Ed Stanek, executive director of the Iowa Lottery. "It's not appropriate that we have traffic jams in any city in the country waiting to buy tickets."
With 80.1 million possible combinations, a player's chance of winning was remote. Still, lottery officials had said there was about a 90 percent chance that at least one winning ticket would be sold.
The odds only fanned the frenzy of would-be multimillionaires who wagered $1 per ticket.
Hours-long lines snaked outside many of the 45,000 retailers selling Powerball tickets, particularly in border towns bombarded by players from non-Powerball states.
Tickets were sold nationwide Wednesday at a rate of 3,000 a minute
Jackpot kept growing
By the time the winning numbers were drawn, the jackpot that earlier had been estimated at $250 million rose to $292 million. After Missouri updated its sales total, the jackpot grew to $295.7 million.
"We knew that we met our $250 million mark toward the end of business on Tuesday and we were actually thinking it might break $300 million, but it looks like it didn't quite do it," Strutt said.
Only one other lottery game has come close to the Powerball record. Last year's Christmas lottery drawing in Spain -- named "El Gordo," or "the Fat One" -- had a $270 million purse, but the grand prize was only $2 million.
Iowa had record sales for the drawing, with 4.8 million tickets sold.
In Connecticut, which set a record for any state by selling $32 million in tickets, Gov. John G. Rowland said the state would reimburse Greenwich for police overtime and the costs related to the Powerball mania that nearly overran the town just over the border from New York, a state that doesn't participate in Powerball.
The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.
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