How many possible combinations are there for the oklahoma powerball lottery?

Question

The regular numbers go from 1 - 55 and the Powerball is from 1 - 42.

Answer 1

146,107,962

There's a good explanation of the math behind this here: http://www.plainmath.net/index.php?page=... .  For Powerball, you need to first figure out the number of ways to choose 5 balls from 55, then multiply by 42 to account for the Powerball.

Andrew's math would be correct for a lottery that picks 5 numbers out of 42, and where you have to get the numbers in the right order.  In Powerball, they pick 5 regular numbers out of 55, and then from a separate drum pick one Powerball from 1 to 42.  Also, order doesn't matter.  So the numbers could be 1-6-17-28-49 with a powerball of 17 for example.

Answer 2

i'm assuming you can only pick a number once here, and that you pick 5 numbers.

the way you do it is:

42x41x40x39x38

=102 080 160

one hundred two million, eighty thousand one hundred sixty