■ A $1 billion Mega Millions prize was won in Michigan.
Jackpot hit $1 billion; Powerball also affected
One ticket hit the Mega Millions jackpot Friday night for a $1 billion jackpot.
The winning ticket was sold in Michigan, officials said. Friday’s numbers were: 4-26-42-50-60 and the Mega Ball was 24. The jackpot was $1 billion.
The closest store near the Las Vegas Valley selling lottery tickets is the Primm Valley Lotto Store on the Nevada-california border. The store is about 45 miles southwest of Las Vegas along Interstate 15.
Lottery fever has been a monthlong event at the Primm Valley Lotto store where people have braved cold weather recently to wait in line for hours for a chance to win a fortune.
Ticket lines in Arizona have been about 20-30 minutes although the drive is longer from Las Vegas than going to Primm.
The record Mega Millions jackpot is $1.537 billion on Oct. 23, 2018.
The latest jackpot-winning Powerball ticket, worth $731.1 million, was sold in a struggling coal mining town whose biggest previous claim to fame was being the hometown of baseball Hall of Famer Lefty Grove.
Someone bought it at Coney Market, a convenience store in the Allegany County town of Lonaconing, the Maryland Lottery announced on Thursday.
The store will get a $100,000 bonus for selling the ticket to the fifth-largest lottery prize in U.S. history.
The Mega Millions top prize had been growing since Sept. 15, when a winning ticket was sold in Wisconsin.
The jackpot figures refer to amounts if a winner opts for an annuity, paid in 30 annual installments. Most winners choose a cash prize, which for Mega Millions will be $739.6 million.
The game is played in 45 states as well as Washington, D.C., and the U.S. Virgin Islands.
Nevada joins Utah, Alabama, Alaska and Hawaii in not offering Mega Millions or Powerball.
It’s only the third time a lottery jackpot has grown so large, but much has changed since the last time such a big prize was seen, in 2018. The odds of winning a jackpot remain the same — incredibly small — but for a variety of reasons fewer people are playing Mega Millions or Powerball.
And even as the huge Mega Millions prize and Powerball jackpot were won this week, Maryland lottery director Gordon Medenica noted, “We’re not out of the woods yet.”
After a peak in October 2018, Medenica said, sales of the big lottery games dropped about 50 percent, prompting talk among lottery officials about jackpot fatigue.
Sales of Mega Millions and Powerball continued to decline after the virus hit along with other lottery games, but while scratch tickets and other instant games rebounded strongly later in the year, national game sales remained moribund.
In response to falling sales, officials updated the national games to reduce starting jackpots from $40 million to $20 million and changed rules about guaranteed minimum increases between drawings.
The moves made fiscal sense but they caused jackpots to grow more slowly, further tamping down sales.
“That’s why it takes so many rolls to get up to a high jackpot level,” Medenica said.
What hasn’t changed are the odds. By design, Mega Millions and Powerball are relatively generous in awarding small dollar prizes, and lottery officials boast there is a roughly 1 in 24 chance of winning something. But to generate huge jackpots, officials must be absolutely miserly about paying jackpots.
It’s hard to fathom how unlikely it is to beat odds of one in
292.2 million for Powerball or one in 302.5 million for Mega Millions.
To get a sense of your chances, Steven Bleiler, a mathematics and statistics professor at Portland State University, said people should imagine a swimming pool 40 feet wide, 120 feet long and 5 feet deep, filled to the brim with M&MS, only one of which is green. To win, all a player must do is jump in blindfolded and wade around until finding that single green candy.
What comes next is unclear. Some states are banking on growth in online games, but while the 10 states that allow purchases on computers and phone apps are seeing rising sales, such purchases remain a relatively small percentage of overall revenue.