The first Powerball Xs & Os drawing results

The first Powerball Xs & Os drawing produced more than 39,000 winners on Sunday. Each play in this new game costs $5.

No ticket matched all eight NFL team logos, so the $1 million jackpot rolls. The second prize, advertised at $20,000, paid $500. The advertised $500 prize paid $40.

The eight teams drawn September 13 were the Chicago Bears, Dallas Cowboys, Green Bay Packers, Kansas City Chiefs, Philadelphia Eagles, Pittsburgh Steelers, San Francisco 49ers, and Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Powerball says the logos are drawn at random and have no connection to game results.

What each prize paid

At the advertised amounts, those 39,369 winning tickets would have paid $1,289,641. They collected $503,839, or 39%. Nearly all of the gap came from the top two tiers, the 829 winners.

The 19 Match 7 tickets were sold in Arizona, Indiana, Kentucky, Maryland (3), Missouri, North Carolina (3), Oklahoma (2), Pennsylvania (3), and South Carolina (4).

Why the prizes shrank

The prize chart carries one line of fine print. "Lower-tier prizes may become pari-mutuel in some circumstances." Pari-mutuel means winners at a level split a pool of money instead of each collecting a fixed amount.

Powerball explained the trigger in a statement Monday. "According to game rules, lower-tier prizes may be paid on a pari-mutuel basis when prize liability limits are reached. In the Sept. 13 drawing, there were more winning tickets than statistically expected across multiple prize tiers. Combined with sales from the game's first drawing, this resulted in lower-tier prizes being paid on a pari-mutuel basis."

The winner counts show how far above expectations they ran. Powerball did not publish sales, but the tiers can be checked against each other. If players picked their eight teams at random, every tier would point to roughly the same number of tickets sold.

Measured against the 4 of 8 tier, the 6 of 8 and 7 of 8 tiers had about two and a half times as many winners as random picks would produce, and 5 of 8 had about one and a half times as many. That pattern is what clustered choices look like, when a large number of players pick many of the same teams and those teams come up together. As you can see by the NFL teams in the first drawing, many popular NFL franchises showed up in the 8 team result.

Powerball has not said which logos players chose most. When the game was announced we noted that picking teams instead of numbers would crowd players onto the same choices, and that a drawing full of heavily picked logos could push far more winners into a tier than a number game would.

What the ticket was worth on Sunday

At the advertised prizes, the four fixed tiers on a $5 ticket are worth $1.66 in expected value, a third of the price. At the amounts paid September 13, the same four tiers were worth about 90 cents for a ticket with randomly chosen teams, 18% of the price. The $7 bottom prize held, and it carried more than half of that value.

The next drawing is Sunday, September 20, at 10 p.m. Eastern, with the jackpot estimated at $1 million. Tickets are sold in 24 jurisdictions.

Sources

Powerball: Powerball Xs & Os lower-tier prize payouts determined on a pari-mutuel basis

Powerball: Powerball Xs & Os draw result, September 13, 2026

Powerball: Powerball Xs & Os prize chart