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Tabitha Showers mans the busy lottery machine Thursday afternoon at the Watson Mart.
Rick Dandes/The Daily Item Early Thursday, the Mega Millions jackpot was just more than $1 billion. Later in the day it had surged to $1.1 billion.
Gordon Midvale fills out a lottery ticket inside a 7-Eleven store in Oakland, Calif. The Mega Millions lottery jackpot has topped $1 billion — only the fourth time a lottery game has reached such heights.
Tabitha Showers mans the busy lottery machine Thursday afternoon at the Watson Mart.
Rick Dandes/The Daily Item Early Thursday, the Mega Millions jackpot was just more than $1 billion. Later in the day it had surged to $1.1 billion.
Gordon Midvale fills out a lottery ticket inside a 7-Eleven store in Oakland, Calif. The Mega Millions lottery jackpot has topped $1 billion — only the fourth time a lottery game has reached such heights.
Up for grabs tonight is $1.1 billion, the third-highest jackpot ever for any lottery game in the United States.
The latest increase ahead of Friday’s 11 p.m. drawing means the prices trails only $1.5 billion prizes won in 2018 and 2016.
All you have to do is beat the 1 in 303 million odds.
That didn’t seem to bother Jake McWilliams on Thursday afternoon when he bought one ticket (each ticket is $2) at Watson Mart.
Laughing at the odds he said, “if it’s my turn to be lucky it really doesn’t matter if I buy one or 10 tickets. Same odds per ticket, right?”
The $1.1 billion prize is for players who get their winnings through an annuity, paid annually over 29 years. Nearly all winners take the cash option, which for Friday’s drawing is an estimated $648.2 million.
Tabitha Showers, who worked the lottery ticket machine on Thursday at Watson Mart, said “there’s been a lot of ticket buying. A lot of excitement.”
The game is played by picking five different numbers from a field of 1-70 and one number from 1-25. You win the jackpot if you pick all six numbers correctly.
The Mega Millions prize has grown so large because it has been more than three months since anyone matched the game’s six numbers and snagged the jackpot. That amounts to 29 consecutive drawings without a winner.
As the prize approached $900 million on Tuesday, the pace of sales picked up. Tuesday didn’t leave players empty-handed. Nine tickets managed to match the first five numbers. Eight of the nine scooped up $1 million in prize money each, while one managed to collect $3 million from the match. The ninth opted to play the Megaplier for an extra $1, resulting in a triple the money prize.
If won, it will be the second largest prize in the 20-year history of Mega Millions, behind only the record $1.537 billion won on Oct. 23, 2018. That winning ticket was sold in South Carolina, and it remains the world’s largest lottery prize ever won on a single ticket.
Four Mega Millions jackpots have been won to date in 2022, in California, New York, Minnesota and Tennessee.
The drawing tonight is at 11 p.m. Eastern Time in Atlanta, Georgia.
Mega Millions tickets are sold in 45 states, Washington, D.C., and the U.S. Virgin Islands. Half of the proceeds from the sale of each Mega Millions ticket remains in the state where the ticket was sold, where the money supports lottery beneficiaries and retailer commissions.
The Associated Press contributed to this story.
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