When the price of Powerball lottery tickets increases from $1 to $2 on Jan. 15, Chris Taranto says, he will still buy them.

So will a lot of other lottery players, he told phillyburbs.com. And their chances of winning will improve.

“People like to dream in this country,” the Delran, N.J., resident said as he purchased tickets for the Powerball and Mega Millions lotteries at the Hartford Deli on Tuesday. “The only true dream left is the lottery.”

With the price increase, the Powerball jackpot will grow from a minimum of $20 million to $40 million, and that could grow to the hundreds of millions if it takes several weeks to get a winner.

Winning the $200,000 PowerBall prize will enable Donny Jones to pay off his bills, but the Idaho native won’t be leaving his cooking job anytime soon, CBS3Springfield.com reports.

“I love my job,” Donny Jones told the news outlet. “I love my bosses and everybody I work with here.”

Jones lives with a disability and has been working at the Hometown Kitchen in Idaho Falls for 16 years, where he first started out as a dishwasher. He says he considers his co-workers family and knows that they’ll help him manage his winnings.

“I was in shock,” Donny Jones told the news outlet. “I’m still in shock.”

A Long Island man’s faith in God has been restored after he prayed for his mother to win the lottery and, the next day, she did.

Sal Bentivegna jokingly issued a prayer for his mother, Gloria, to win the lottery after she lost money playing slots in Atlantic City.

“He said ‘I’ll tell you what Ma, if there’s a God or Jesus up there, I’m asking him, please let my mother win,’” Gloria Bentivegna said.

The chance of winning the lottery is often said to be a tad bit smaller than the chance of being hit by lightning.

Lightning is said never to strike twice at the same place.

So consider the odds of someone winning the lotter. Twice. On the same day. From the same lottery.

That’s what happened to James McAllister (62) from Acworth, USA, when he bought two scratch off tickets on Valentine’s day.

James brought his wife for a Valentine’s breakfast. Along Highway 92 he bought a Georgia Lottery Millionaire Jumbo Bucks scratch off ticket — and won $5,000.

(CNN) — She was a mother of three living in a small apartment and working four jobs. And then, as if in a fairy tale, she won her state’s lottery last year. But the story doesn’t have the happy ending you might expect.

She didn’t do anything overly extravagant after the $1.3 million got slashed in taxes. She bought a house, got a new wardrobe at the Salvation Army, cut work down to just one job and invested the rest.

And then came the phone calls: promises, marriage proposals, accusations, threats. People who used to volunteer to help her do things wanted money for their trouble. Family members, she says, tried to run her life, and control her money.

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. – A Missouri man who won a $258 million Powerball jackpot says he hasn’t decided yet if he’ll quit his job at the convenience store where he bought the winning ticket.

Chris Shaw — a 29-year-old tattooed father of three who was raised by his grandparents in rural southern Missouri — came forward Thursday as the winner of the 10th-largest Powerball jackpot ever.

PIERRE, S.D. – It has the makings of a Hollywood script: A young rancher struggling to eke out a living in one of the poorest corners of the nation claims one of the biggest undivided jackpots in U.S. lottery history — $232 million — after buying the ticket in a town called Winner.

As he sported a black cowboy hat and a huge grin, 23-year-old Neal Wanless accepted his giant-sized Powerball check at a ceremony Friday.

Wanless, who is single and lives with his mother and father on the family’s 320-acre ranch near Mission, said he’s going to buy himself a bigger spread, repay the kindness other townspeople have shown his family and spend his newfound fortune wisely.

The 10, who work for Chubb Commercial Insurance in Whitehouse Station, New Jersey, held a news conference Wednesday to announce their win.

Bob Space of Toms River, New Jersey, held up a lottery ticket that clearly showed the winning numbers from Tuesday’s drawing: 26, 32, 35, 43, 52 and 10.

“I checked and I rechecked and then I sent it to my wife,” said Space, who purchased 50 sets of lottery numbers for himself and his nine co-workers from a Singin Oil gas station near his house on Monday.