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At some point, either on Friday night or on the road, someone will win the Mega Millions jackpot.
It probably won’t be you.
With odds stacked against players matching all six numbers needed to hit the motherboard, the lottery’s biggest prize pool reached about $ 970 million for Friday night’s draw. The cash option – which most winners choose on an annuity – is $ 716.3 million (before tax). The jackpot is also the third largest in the history of the US lottery.
Friday night’s draw comes just days after another lottery game won a huge sum of money won: a ticket purchased in Maryland won the $ 731.1 million Powerball jackpot ($ 546.8 million option cash), which ranks as the sixth largest prize in history.
“We know players love big jackpots, and when the numbers are so high, it becomes a national phenomenon,” said Gordon Medenica, Maryland lottery director and CEO of Mega Millions.
“Everyone wants to dream of what they would do if they won,” Medenica said.
The Mega Millions jackpot has been on the rise since mid-September, when someone raised $ 120 million ($ 95.4 million in cash) and the biggest prize was reset to $ 20 million. That is 37 weeks in which no one matches all six numbers in the drawings twice a week, marking the longest stretch ever without a winner, according to lottery officials.
Each Mega Millions ticket has approximately 1 in 302 million chances to win the jackpot. For Powerball, it’s a little better: 1 in 292 million.
Even if you buy more tickets, you wouldn’t move the needle too much. To give you even a 50-50 chance of winning the Mega Millions jackpot – that is, the same odds when you toss a coin once – you will need to buy more than 151 million combinations of different numbers. Even then, however, you could not guarantee that you were the only winner.
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In fact, the largest jackpot in US history – a $ 1.59 billion Powerball prize in 2016 – was divided into three ways.
For the draw on Friday night, lottery officials estimate that 40% of all possible combinations of numbers will be played.
Of course, you can win the game without hitting the jackpot. The latest Mega Millions draw, which took place on Tuesday night, produced almost 5.2 million winning tickets, according to the lottery. This included two winners of $ 2 million each, 11 winners of $ 1 million each and 139 winners who raised at least $ 10,000.
Once the Mega Millions jackpot is won, it will be reset to $ 20 million.