Ahead of Wednesday night's Powerball drawing for about $1.5 billion dollars, people waited in line down the block at a so-called "lucky" lottery retailer near Los Angeles.
KELLY MCEVERS, HOST: Sorry, St. Louis fans. Maybe you'd have better luck playing the lottery. The next Powerball drawing is tonight at 10:59 Eastern time. This is the drawing for the record-breaking jackpot of about $1.5 billion. People have been lining up around the block to get their tickets at places that are considered to be lucky. We sent NPR's Becky Sullivan to such a spot here in Southern California.</s>BECKY SULLIVAN, BYLINE: Driving up to the Blue Bird Liquor near the LA airport yesterday at 4 o'clock, I saw the line way before I could see the actual store. There were at least 200 people waiting.</s>BECKY SULLIVAN, BYLINE: What's special about this place?</s>KAY WILLIAMS: Oh, this place - this place is the bomb.</s>IRIS PLATIRO: There's been a lot of winners, actually, out of there.</s>KAY WILLIAMS: Yeah, that come out of this place.</s>IRIS PLATIRO: Yeah.</s>KAY WILLIAMS: So you know what? And if you want to win...</s>IRIS PLATIRO: You've got to rub the blue bird.</s>KAY WILLIAMS: Yeah, you don't go to places where they've never had a winner.</s>BECKY SULLIVAN, BYLINE: Kay Williams and Iris Platiro have been waiting for an hour and a half. At first, I thought they were friends waiting together. Turned out they'd just been waiting for so long, they'd become buddies.</s>KAY WILLIAMS: You know what? We're talking Oprah money. So you know what? I can wait. I can wait.</s>IRIS PLATIRO: Yeah.</s>BECKY SULLIVAN, BYLINE: Williams is an elementary school teacher. Platiro works in customs. They've both been here before, and they're here again tonight at the lucky spot to buy the tickets for lottery pools at work.</s>KAY WILLIAMS: Up on the ceiling and on the walls, they have all the - all the winners that they've had in the past. And if you can't boast that, why even be there? You want to go somewhere where at least you know people have won. That's the smart thing.</s>BECKY SULLIVAN, BYLINE: Williams is right about the inside of the store. Every square inch is covered with winning lottery tickets and those big checks from the California state lottery.</s>EDUARDO DURAN: 88,000, 227,000, 133,000 - all year long.</s>BECKY SULLIVAN, BYLINE: Eduardo Duran has worked here for a long time. He says the crowds have always been like this.</s>EDUARDO DURAN: Seven different times, people have become a billionaire at this store. So, you know, people are - people just hear about that. And where else do you hear that from?</s>BECKY SULLIVAN, BYLINE: Duran guesses that about three-quarters of the business at this liquor store comes from lottery tickets. On a day like yesterday, it's obviously even more than that. I wanted to ask an expert the big question - does buying a ticket at a lucky store actually help your odds?</s>CURTIS BENNETT: Not a bit.</s>BECKY SULLIVAN, BYLINE: Curtis Bennett is a math professor at Loyola Marymount University here in LA. He says there is a simple reason these stores have so many winners.</s>CURTIS BENNETT: You know, if a lottery store sells five times as many tickets as some other store, then they're five times more likely to have a winner.</s>BECKY SULLIVAN, BYLINE: Bennett describes the odds of winning tonight's Powerball as the equivalent of picking out a single special poker trip from a stack 613 miles high. That is almost the distance from LA to the Oregon border. That said, the math department at LMU bought a ticket anyway, he says - a single ticket bought at a non-lucky location - the mall down the street. Becky Sullivan, NPR News.