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They do not buy lottery tickets. Not usually, anyway.
But jackpot hunters usually emerge when they see the Mega Millions prize spread higher and higher, and they say to themselves, "Good God, why not?"
It's by design.
And if you've noticed a series of awesome jackpots from Mega Millions and Powerball designed in the same way recently, that's also wanted.
The Mega Millions draw last Tuesday for a $ 667 million jackpot did not result in any winners.
The price has been reduced to $ 900 million. If anyone wins the Mega Millions on Friday, it will be the second-largest jackpot in the history of the American lottery, behind the 2016 Powerball jackpot, worth 1, $ 6 billion, spread over three winning tickets.
And the current Powerball jackpot also continues to grow: no one won Wednesday's draw, so on Saturday the jackpot will be worth about $ 430 million.
Mega Millions has existed in one form or another since 1996. But it is only recently that the game has decimated huge jackpots. Lottery officials who run Mega Millions changed the rules and probabilities of the game last October to charge jackpots less often, boosting the growth of their monster. Since that change, three of Mega Millions' top six jackpots have been paid.
And then, there's the drawing of Friday's Mega Millions monster, the biggest in the history of the game.
"In the end, these games are all about jackpots," said Gordon Medenica, director of lotteries and gaming in Maryland on Wednesday.
Officials feared that the relatively smaller but more frequent prices – $ 100 million "paltry", for example – would cause a "jackpot fatigue", which is why they changed the game last year, said Medenica. Now, the Mega Millions jackpots are growing and creating huge prices with infrequent payments. The other important change that has contributed to the growth of the jackpot is the increase in ticket price Mega Millions, which has doubled to $ 2.
The last time anyone touched the Mega Millions, it was July 24, when an office pool in Silicon Valley won the $ 543 million jackpot. The jackpot has been reset to $ 40 million for the next draw and has skyrocketed since.
The game, which was played in 44 US states, as well as in the District of Columbia and the US Virgin Islands, becomes a "cultural phenomenon" between $ 200 and $ 400 million, said Medenica, who holds the position of informal director and rotating for 11 years. Mega Millions State Consortium. When jackpots are close to half a billion dollars, state lotteries do not even feel the need to advertise, he said.
Here's how Mega Millions worked: Players chose five numbers from 1 to 75 and a mega from 1 to 15. The odds of winning the first prize were 1 in 258,890,850.
Since Mega Millions changed the formula, players now choose five numbers ranging from 1 to 70 and a mega number from 1 to 25. The odds of winning the jackpot are now 1 in 302,575,350.
Reducing the number of balls for the first five numbers increases the chances of winning a smaller prize. But increasing the number of Mega Balls makes it more difficult to win the jackpot. (You always win the jackpot by matching the six winning numbers in a draw.)
Powerball made similar changes to its rules in 2015.
The lottery officials said the change was a response to players asking to start with a big jackpot and win more modest prizes, such as getting back your $ 2 up to a $ 1 million payout. . five digits.
Lottery commissions have used human psychology and optimism to drive sales. They discovered that when the jackpot reached an absurdly high number, even skeptical players would buy tickets, perhaps on a whim in a convenience store or spending a few dollars in an office pool, Medenica said.
He calls these players "infrequent players," and their participation helps raise jackpots to historic levels, he said. Colorado Lottery spokeswoman Kelly Tabor called them "jackpot hunters" as the Powerball jackpot swelled to become the second-biggest lottery story.
That is up to Friday's Mega Millions drawing, which could produce one or more instant mega-millionaires.
Mega Millions is in "unknown territory," said Medenica, and financial models of lotteries can not predict what will happen. The estimated jackpot could be revised to account for an increase in ticket sales if officials saw a slight increase in activity before the next draw, he said. On Wednesday, the jackpot went from $ 868 million to $ 900 million.
US lottery sales totaled $ 77.7 billion in fiscal 2018, up about $ 5 billion from a year earlier, according to La Fleur & # 39; Magazine, a publication focused on the lottery sector. Sales were still down from 2016, when they had exceeded $ 80 billion, according to the North American Association of State and Provincial Lotteries. That year, lottery ticket sales eclipsed the total spending by Americans on the purchase of movie tickets, video games, books, music and sports.
Lottery sales, championed by state commissions to help finance education programs and veterans programs, have drawn fire in recent years. For example, a survey conducted by KPCC / LAist in California "revealed that the Lottery's contributions to education remained virtually unchanged from 12 years ago, even though revenues grew by billions of dollars ".
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