Is the Lottery Worth It?

Let's take a look at some jackpot history. The longest run for a Mega Millions jackpot was 36 drawings that ended on January 22, 2021, with someone winning a $1.05 billion jackpot. The record number of lottery draws was for a Powerball prize that ended after 41 drawings when someone won the record $2.04 billion jackpot.

What does it take to win the "big one" for Mega Millions? You must match all six numbers. There are roughly 302.6 million possible number combinations for the five white balls, numbered from 1 to 70, and the separate gold Mega Ball, numbered from 1 to 25, in the Mega Millions lottery. Mega Millions is played in 45 states, Washington D.C, and the U.S. Virgin Islands.

Consider the tickets sold for the Friday, August 4, 2023, drawing. All of the tickets sold for that drawing produced only about 35% of the possible number combinations. That means about 65% of possible combinations, or nearly 200 million options, were not covered. When a drawing fails to produce a big winner, the prizes roll over for weeks at a time. Bigger prizes sell more lottery tickets, which also drives more revenue for the state services lotteries fund. And thus the cycle continues!

What are things more likely to happen than winning the lottery, at odds of 1 in 302.6 million? A common comparison is the odds of getting struck by lightning once in your lifetime, which stand at about one in 15,300. Even if you bought a lottery ticket for every drawing over 80 years (two times a week for Mega Millions and three times a week for Powerball), you would still be far less likely to win than to be struck by lightning one time in your life, Syracuse University mathematics professor Dr. Steven Diaz said. You are much more likely to become President (1 in 10 million), be killed by a vending machine (1 in 112 million), or die from being left-handed and using a right-handed product incorrectly (1 in 4.4 million) than winning the lottery. However, you do have better odds of winning the lottery than getting a perfect NCAA basketball bracket (1 in 9,223,372,036,854,775,808) or shuffling a deck of cards into perfect, sequential order (1 in 10^68)!