The Mega Millions jackpot climbed to $450 million ahead of Friday night’s drawing, but that’s not even the biggest lottery prize up for grabs this weekend.
Background with $100 bills (Credit: hynci / iStock / Getty Images Plus)
That would be the jackpot for Powerball, which is up to $570 million as of Friday evening, bringing the total of the two to $1.02 billion — should anyone be amazingly lucky to win them both, of course.
The total is the third-largest combined ever, according to the Mega Millions website.
Even by itself, Friday’s jackpot is the fourth-largest in the game’s history — the biggest one was $656 million — and ranks 11th in U.S. lottery history. At $450 million, the prize has an estimated cash value of $281.2 million.
“The Mega Millions and Powerball jackpots are reaching historic levels, and that generates interest from everyone all across the country,” Mega Millions Lead Director Gordon Medenica said in a news release. “When the jackpots reach these levels, everyone starts to daydream about what they would do if they won. That’s what makes a jackpot roll so exciting, and to have two of them makes it even more fun.”
And as noted in the release, only one jackpot in history was larger than the combined total of the two games — the record $1.56 billion Powerball prize that was split three ways in January 2016.
This week was the first time on record that both lottery games offered prizes of $400 million or more at the same time. But it’s a situation that is set to happen more frequently.
That’s because there are now longer odds in both games, leading to less frequent jackpot winners and thus more frequent large jackpots.
Last October, Mega Millions changed the numbers that players could choose from, bringing the odds of picking all six numbers to 1 in 302.6 million, from 1 in 258.9 million under the old format. It also raised the price of a single ticket to $2.
The idea was to increase the size of the top prize. And so far, it has worked.
The move was similar to one made by Powerball in October 2015. That took the odds of winning that game from 1 in 175 million to 1 in 292 million. The odds of winning both games is 1 in 88 quadrillion.
But the longer odds haven’t been stopping people from buying tickets. In fact, the larger jackpots seem to be encouraging more sales. In fact, Americans spent more than $80 billion on them in 2016, which is more than they spent on movies, video games, music, sports tickets and books combined.
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