Mega Millions and Powerball manipulated the odds to create monster jackpots

They don’t buy lottery tickets. Not habitually, anyway.

But the jackpot chasers typically emerge when they see the Mega Millions prize tick up and up and up, and they figure, “Hell, why not?” That’s by design. And if you have noticed a run of eye-popping jackpots from Mega Millions and the similarly designed Powerball recently, that’s by design, too.

There were no winners in Tuesday’s Mega Millions drawing for a $667 million jackpot.

So the prize rolled over, ballooning to $1 billion. If somebody wins the Mega Millions on Friday, it will be the second-largest jackpot in U.S. lottery history, behind the 2016 Powerball jackpot that was worth $1.6 billion, split across three winning tickets.

And the current Powerball jackpot continues to grow, too: Nobody won Wednesday’s drawing, so on Saturday, the jackpot will be worth an estimated $430 million.

Mega Millions has existed in some form since 1996. But only recently has the game been shelling out massive jackpots. The lottery officials who run Mega Millions tweaked the rules and odds of the game last October to make jackpots pay out less frequently, spurring their monster growth. Since that change, three of the six largest Mega Millions jackpots have been paid out.

And then there’s Friday’s monster Mega Millions drawing, the largest in the game’s history.

“Ultimately, these games, they’re all about the jackpots,” Gordon Medenica, Maryland’s lottery and gaming director, said Wednesday.

Officials were worried that the relatively smaller but more frequent prizes – a “paltry” $100 million, for instance – would result in “jackpot fatigue,” which is why they tweaked the game last year, Medenica said. Now, the Mega Millions jackpots grow and grow, creating huge prizes with infrequent payouts. The other significant change that helped fuel the jackpot growth was the increase in the Mega Millions ticket price, which doubled to $2.

The last time somebody hit the Mega Millions was July 24, when an office pool in Silicon Valley won the $543 million jackpot. The jackpot reset at $40 million for the next drawing and has been soaring ever since.