Friday Night’s Mega Millions Jackpot Ninth Largest in History: $1.15 Billion

The ninth-largest lottery jackpot in U.S. history, $1.15 billion, will be on the line in Friday evening’s Mega Millions drawing after no tickets with all six numbers were sold for 30 consecutive drawings.

There hasn’t been a drawing with a grand prize winner since Sept. 10 when a ticket worth $810 million was sold in Texas, the 14th-largest jackpot in U.S. history.

Ticket sales end at 7:45 p.m., and the drawing will be conducted at 8 p.m.

The odds of matching all five numbers and the Mega number is 1 in 302,575,350, according to the California Lottery. The overall chance of winning a prize is 1 in 24.

Buying tickets at a store where tickets with large jackpots have been sold in the past will not increase a purchaser’s chance of winning a jackpot, according to USC mathematics professor Ken Alexander.

“The chance that a given place will sell a winning lottery ticket is just related to how many tickets they sell,” Alexander told City News Service.

However, players wanting a better chance of avoiding sharing the jackpot should choose numbers that aren’t selected as often, Alexander said. Lottery players frequently choose the date of their birthdays as one of their numbers, so numbers higher than 31 would be played less, Alexander said.

Friday’s jackpot is the fifth-largest in the history of the Mega Millions game which began in 1996 as The Big Game and was given the new name Mega Millions in 2002. There have been four Powerball drawings with larger jackpots.

The Mega Millions game is played in 45 states, the District of Columbia and U.S. Virgin Islands.

— City News Service