New York – Lottery officials say they are increasing the MegaMillions lottery jackpot to $640 million, raising what was already a world-record prize.
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Kimberly Starks, a spokeswoman for the Georgia Lottery, said Friday the jackpot had increased. The jackpot had stood at $540 million before Friday’s announcement. The previous record jackpot was $390 million in 2007.
A drawing for the fortune is set for 11 p.m. Friday in Atlanta.
The odds of winning the jackpot had been set at about 1 in 176 million.
MegaMillions has drawn long lines of lottery players in stores in the 42 states plus Washington, D.C., and the Virgin Islands where tickets are sold. The world-record jackpot has also lured some residents to travel to other states to buy $1 tickets.
If there is no winner tonight, the jackpot could well hit 1 billion dollars!!
It will probably end up being won by some hot shot who spent $1M of tickets…
or will be won by 40 different syndicates, each with an average of 10 people …
all I know is that it wont be me!
The real winner is only the government.
Someone is going to become miserable tonight!! Gaurenteed!!
The simple math is this: There are 176 million possible combinations of winning numbers. If you bought 1 ticket for each combination, you’d spend $176 million but you’d be guaranteed of a win. If you were the only winner and took the lump sum, you’d get all that money back and have an additional $180 million or so.
They didn’t take into account that if you buy all the lottery tickets, that means you win every prize possible. Meaning you will for sure have won the jackpot, and you will definitely get 5+0 prize which is $250,000 a pop (you automatically get 45 of those) for an extra $11.25 million and every combination of 4+1 which will get you $10,000 a pop, with even higher amount of tickets that provide that. I wonder what the automatic payout comes out to be.