Pals' Powerball pool didn't win, but will continue
TAMPA (FOX 13) - Two Bay Area men purchased $146,000 worth of Powerball tickets in a social media pool that went viral. While they didn't win the big jackpot, all is not lost.
We caught up with Ryan McGuinness and Shane Krugman today at the Metro Market in Ybor City, where the 73,000 tickets were being put through the lotto machine to check for smaller prizes -- one at a time.
The store workers spent from Sunday until 9:30 last night printing out all those tickets, so they say it's going to take a few days to feed them all through the machines and check to see which ones are winners.
"It was tough to even get the tickets physically printed in time with that many," McGuinness explained.
McGuiness estimates they'll end up with about $15,000 in secondary prizes.
"I mean, we would have loved to win," he said. "We were at 4,000-to-1 chance to win. It was a huge long shot, but everybody in the group had so much excitement and we would do it again. A lot of people said it was the best time they had in their life, literally."
"The process was great," Krugman offered. "It's been a great experience."
The guys posted pictures of the tickets on their closed Facebook group to keep it fair and allow all 292 people -- even a friend in Croatia -- to share in the excitement.
Their plan now is to roll over their winnings to the next drawing. They say they'll keep buying more tickets for their group until they either win big or run out of money -- so the game continues.
"We're just going to buy more tickets and buy more tickets until we either hit a jackpot or it's gone," Krugman added.