Huge lottery jackpots like tonight's more common, after odds to win got slimmer
Dec. 30—If you think you're seeing huge lottery jackpots more often these days, you're right.
Tonight's Mega Millions lottery drawing includes a jackpot estimated at $640 million before taxes — the sixth-largest in the history of the game. A chart from the lottery group shows three of the six biggest jackpots in the 20-year history of Mega Millions have been in the past two years.
And it's not just Mega Millions. Friday night's large jackpot comes just a few weeks after the largest lottery prize of any kind, a $2.04 billion Powerball drawing in November, which was won by a California resident.
The increasingly large prizes have to do with longer odds of winning, and when people don't win week after week, the prizes get larger. In the format Mega Millions used from 2013-17, players had to correctly pick 5 regular numbers from 75 options, plus one mega ball of 15 choices, to win the jackpot. The odds of winning were 1 in 258.9 million.
In late 2017, the format changed (pick 5 numbers out of 70 and 1 mega ball of 25). Now the odds of winning a Mega Millions jackpot are one in 302.6 million, according to the Associated Press. That's almost a 1-in-America shot, as the U.S. population is just over 330 million.
"All Mega Millions drawings go through cycles of play before someone snags the jackpot," said Marie Kilbane, public information officer for the Ohio Lottery Commission. "Based on the luck of the draw, this year appears to be the year of big jackpots."
Big jackpots lead to big daydreams, whether it's the simple act of never returning to work from a current holiday vacation, or more specific ideas like sports cars, yachts and world travel.
Travis Drew bought a Mega Millions ticket on Thursday at Hall's Eastwood Market on Springfield Street in Riverside. Drew said he's not a constant lottery player, but he did have a few "big win" ideas — to buy beachfront property or invest in real estate.
"I play every once in a while, (just) pick up a ticket," Drew said.
Jackpots in the last year have varied from $20 million to more than $1 billion, Kilbane noted.
She said when jackpots go up, that also means lottery sales go up. As a snapshot, Mega Millions sales by Ohio Lottery players increased 65% from Dec. 23 to Dec. 27, from about $1.66 million to $2.74 million.
The $640 million advertised pre-tax prize is for those who choose to have the money paid out in 30 annual installments. For those who choose the prize in a lump sum, the pre-tax amount would be $328.3 million.
In Ohio, profits from the Ohio Lottery Commission go to funding education in the state. Lottery officials said last fiscal year the Ohio Lottery contributed $1.4 billion to the Lottery Profits Education Fund, which supports K-12 education in Ohio.
Mega Millions is in 47 U.S. jurisdictions, and all participating state lotteries have an agreement to sell the game. Each local jurisdiction makes rules about lottery sales and how the payouts are done.
Even without winning the big prize, there are still nine prize tiers, with corresponding prizes.
Only two winning Mega Millions tickets have been sold in Ohio in the past seven years. One of those two was sold in the Dayton area — the winner of a $143 million jackpot in May 2018, sold at Fat Daddy's Road Dog LLC in Moraine.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
