Some pools win because they kept playing. This one won because of what it did with eight dollars.
A group of 27 coworkers in northeast Ohio pooled their money for Powerball in December 2025. In the drawing of Wednesday, December 17, one of their tickets won $8. Rather than hand out 30 cents each, the group put the $8 toward a $10 ticket for the Saturday, December 20 drawing.
That ticket, bought at a Speedway at 103 East Avenue in Tallmadge, matched the five white balls, 4, 5, 28, 52 and 69, for the $1 million prize. WHIO-TV reported the win on January 19, 2026, citing the Ohio Lottery.
What they get
After federal and state withholding of 26.75 percent, the group shares $732,500, according to WHIO. If the split is even, that is $27,129.62 per person, with 26 cents left to assign. The reports did not say how the group divides it or who holds the ticket.
One of the winners joked, per WHIO, that it was fortunate the group had not won that night’s jackpot of about $1.25 billion, because then they might have had to think about quitting.
What went right
They had a small-prize rule, even if they never wrote it down. An $8 win across 27 people is pennies. Rolling it into the next ticket is what most pools would choose, and the next ticket was the one.
They kept the group together between drawings. Rolling a prize forward only works if the same people are in the next drawing. Twenty-seven coworkers managed that across one weekend.
What could have gone wrong
Look at the two seams. First, the $8 belonged to the people in the December 17 pool. If one of them skipped the December 20 ticket, they had a claim on about 30 cents of the winning ticket’s cost. Second, the reports agree on the prize and the numbers, but a reader has to trust that the head count of 27 is right. In a group that size, with money rolling from one drawing to the next, “who exactly is in this time” is the question that matters most.
The one lesson for your pool
Decide the small-prize rule before the first drawing, and let the record carry the money forward.
A ShareTheWinning pool has a setting for exactly this. When the admin creates the pool, they can set a small-prize rollover amount. Prizes under it roll into the next round’s pot instead of being paid out, and the agreement every member accepts says so. The rollover shows in the ledger as a transfer from one round to the next, visible to everyone. Members who stay in see their share of the next ticket; a member who leaves is paid their share of the rolled prize instead.
And the head count is never a matter of trust. Each round locks before the ticket is bought, and the snapshot lists every member and share for that drawing. Twenty-seven names, frozen, with confirmed payments next to each one.
Read next
The pool agreement, explained shows where the rollover rule sits in the text. When nobody buys the ticket covers the other things that can happen to a pot between the lock and the drawing. Our Ohio page lists the state’s withholding, deadline and publicity rules with their sources. The Journey walks a pool from the latest result to a settled round.
