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Next Mega Millions Drawing
09/20$47,000,000Estimated jackpotWinning numbersMega MillionsYesterday- 14
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Drawing days Tuesday & Friday at 11pm ET / 8pm PTwww.megamillions.comJun 7, 2020 · What are the odds of winning the Mega Millions? The odds of winning the Mega Millions jackpot is 302,575,350 to 1. That represents a single ticket out of a possible 300+ million possible winning combinations. That's huge number, no doubt.
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With the Mega Millions lottery prize reaching over a billion dollar heading into Tuesday's drawing, some Americans may be wondering what they can do to increase their chances of winning.
To be sure, it all boils down to luck, but you can still try to increase your odds. Here are the best strategies for doing just that.
The Mega Millions latest jackpot has risen to an estimated $1.58 billion — the largest in the game's history.
How to increase your chances of winning? The unsurprising short answer is, buy as many tickets as you can within reason. That's according to Mark Glickman, a senior lecturer of statistics at Harvard University.
The odds of winning the Mega Millions jackpot are approximately one in 302.5 million. With odds that slim, Glickman said it's best to focus on picking numbers that are completely random. That will help ensure you're not making the same picks as someone else — and that you won't have to split the prize money with anyone, should you win.
"You should just completely have patternless random numbers," he said. "No birthdays that have special meaning to you because other people are likely to make those same picks."
No winning tickets were sold in Friday's Mega Millions drawing. Tuesday's drawing will most likely top the largest Mega Millions payout ever — which happened in October 2018 when a South Carolina resident won $1.5 billion.
The jackpot from 2018 and today have grown bigger by design, College of the Holy Cross economics professor Victor Matheson said earlier this year. The Multi-State Lottery Association (MUSL), a not-for-profit that coordinates the Mega Millions, has transformed it into a national game, made it more difficult to win the jackpot and increased the price of each ticket from $1 to $2.
As the Washington Post reported in 2018, the new rules gave participants more numbers to choose from, making it less likely they would guess the combination required to win the jackpot. Mega Millions is played in 45 states along with Washington, D.C., and the U.S. Virgin Islands. Four Americans have won a Mega Millions jackpot larger than $1 billion since the rule changes.
Higher ticket prices and lower odds of winning make the jackpot grow faster from week to week, Matheson said.
The next drawing is set for Tuesday at 11 p.m. Eastern time. The jackpot winner, should there be one, will be able to choose from a series of annuity payments across 30 years or a one-time cash option of approximately $757.2 million.
But given the almost impossible odds of winning the Mega Millions, experts stress that you shouldn't spend all your money on lottery tickets. If you choose to play, it's important to be mindful of what you can afford — and maybe consider other places to put your money, even if it's just a few dollars at a time.
- khristopher.brooks@paramount.com
- 3 min
Your chances of winning the Mega Millions jackpot are 1 in 302,575,350. You can still win prizes by matching fewer numbers. All of the different ways to win are shown in the table below, together with the probabilities for each category and the prize that you will be paid.
The chart below shows how many numbers you need to win a prize, the payout for those numbers and the odds of it happening on your ticket.
Jul 27, 2022 · How much is the jackpot, what time is the Mega Millions drawing, and what are my odds of winning? The $1.1 billion prize is for winners who choose the annuity option, paid annually over 30...
Mar 22, 2024 · Your odds of winning the Mega Millions jackpot are pretty slim: Just 1 in 302,575,350, according to the lottery. The odds of winning the smaller, $1 million prize are 1 in 12,607,306.
Jul 19, 2023 · The odds of winning a Powerball jackpot — no matter the size — stand near 1 in 292.2 million. Chances of taking home Mega Millions’ top prize are even lower, at about 1 in 302.6 million. Because of the almost impossible chance of winning big, experts stress that you shouldn’t spend all your money on lottery tickets.
