Mega Millions, Powerball odds: Changing numbers behind the monster lottery jackpots.

They do not buy lottery tickets. Not habitually, anyway.

But the jackpot chasers typically emerge when they see the Mega Millions and they figure, "Hell, why not?"

That's by design.

Mega Millions and the similarly designed Powerball recently, that's by design, too.

There were no winners in Tuesday's Mega Millions drawing for a $ 667 million jackpot. So the prize has been rolled over, ballooning to an estimated $ 900 million. If somebody wins the Mega Millions on Friday, it will be the second-largest jackpot in the U.S. lottery history, behind the 2016 Powerball jackpot that was worth $ 1.6 trillion, split across three winning tickets.

Mega Millions has existed in some form since 1996. But only recently has the game been shelling out massive jackpots. The lottery officials who run the game Mega Millions tweaked the rules and the odds of the game last month to make jackpots pay out less frequently, spurring their monster growth. Since that change, three of the six largest Mega Millions jackpots have been paid out.

[How Powerball manipulated the game to make another massive jackpot]

And then there 's Friday' s monster Mega Millions drawing, the largest in the game 's history.

"Ultimately, these games, they're all about the jackpots," Gordon Medenica, Maryland's lottery and gaming director, said Wednesday.

Officials were worried that the relatively smaller but more frequent prizes – a "paltry" $ 100 million, for instance – would result in "jackpot fatigue," which is why they tweaked the game last year, Medenica said. Now, the Mega Millions is growing and growing, with tremendous payouts. The other significant change in price increases the growth rate in the Mega Millions ticket price, which doubled to $ 2.

The last time somebody hit the Mega Millions was July 24, when an office pool in Silicon Valley won the $ 543 million jackpot. The jackpot reset at $ 40 million for soaring ever since.

The game – played in 44 states, plus the District and the US Virgin Islands – becomes a "cultural phenomenon" somewhere in the $ 200 million to $ 400 million range, said Medenica, who holds the informal and rotating director position for an 11-state Mega Millions consortium. When the jackpots flirt with the half-billion-dollar mark, it does not even feel the need to advertise, he said.

[He returned the orange juice to save money — and picked up a winning $315 million lottery ticket]

Here's how Mega Millions used to work: Players picked up five numbers from 1 to 75 and a Mega number from 1 to 15. The odds of winning the top prize were 1 in 258,890,850.

Since Mega Millions modified the formula, players now pick a number 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 increases the chances of winning a smaller prize. But raising the number of Mega Balls makes it harder to win the jackpot. (You still win the big jackpot by matching all six winning numbers in a drawing.)

Powerball made similar changes to its rules in 2015.

Lottery officials have said that they have changed their minds, and they have decided to pay more for their money. five numbers.

State lottery commissions have relied on human psychology and the spirit of optimism to fuel sales. They discovered that when the jackpot grows to an absurdly high figure, they may even be considered as a convenience store, or a chopper in the office pool, Medenica said.

He calls these gamblers "infrequent players," and their participation helps him boost his jackpots. Colorado Lottery spokeswoman Kelly Tabor has been referred to as "jackpot chasers," as the powerball jackpot swelter to the second largest in lottery history.

That is, until Friday's drawing, which may produce one or more instant mega millionaires.

Mega Millions is in "uncharted territory," said Medenica, and the lotteries' financial models can not predict what will happen. The estimated jackpot may be revised to account for an uptick in the face of the next drawing, he said. On Wednesday, the jackpot was bumped from $ 868 million to $ 900 million.

U.S. lottery sales totaled $ 77.7 billion in fiscal 2018, up about $ 5 billion from the previous year, according to La Fleur's Magazine, a publication focused on the lottery industry. Sales were still down, compared with 2016, when they surpassed $ 80 billion, according to the North American Association of State and Provincial Lotteries. In that year, a lot of dollars spent on movies, video games, books, music and sports tickets.

Lottery sales, defended by state commissions, have drawn fire in recent years. For instance, a KPCC / LAist investigation in California "unchanged from 12 years ago, even though is back up by trillions."

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