Lottery players will have another shot at a huge Mega Millions jackpot Friday night and a chance to break a stretch of more than three months without a big winner of the game.

The estimated $940 million prize has been building since someone last matched all six numbers and won the jackpot April 18. Since then, there have been 28 straight drawings without a jackpot winner.

The jackpot is now the eighth-largest ever in the U.S. It comes a little over a week after someone in Los Angeles won a $1.08 billion Powerball prize that ranked as the sixth-largest in U.S. history. It’s still a mystery who won that prize.

The $940 million jackpot would be for a sole winner choosing to be paid through an annuity with annual payments over 30 years. However, lottery winners almost always opt for a lump sum payment, which for Friday night’s drawing would be an estimated $472.5 million.

The Mega Millions jackpot drawing will take place Friday at 10 p.m. CDT.

Here’s what else to know ahead of the multimillion-dollar drawing.

The odds of winning the Mega Millions jackpot are 1 in 302,575,350. Your odds of winning are only slightly improved by buying more than one ticket. And the odds are so long that it’s certainly not worth spending money you’ll miss for more tickets, experts warn. If buying one ticket gives you a 1 in 302,575,350 of winning the jackpot, spending $10 for five tickets improves your chances to only 5 in 303 million. The same is true is you spend $100. So you could spend a lot of money on tickets and still almost undoubtedly not hit the jackpot. Lottery officials say the average player buys two or three tickets, meaning they’re putting money down on a dream with very little chance of a jackpot payoff. For every dollar players spend on the lottery, they will lose about 35 cents on average, according to an analysis of lottery data by the Howard Center for Investigative Journalism at the University of Maryland.

That’s how the games have been designed. The credit for such big jackpots comes down to math — and more difficult odds. In 2015, the Powerball lottery lengthened the odds of winning from 1 in 175.2 million to 1 in 292.2 million. Mega Millions followed two years later, stretching the odds of winning the top prize from 1 in 258.9 million to 1 in 302.6 million. The largest lottery jackpots in the U.S. have come since those changes were made.

The $940 million prize up for grabs Friday night is one of the biggest in U.S. history. It’s the fifth largest jackpot for Mega Millions and the eighth largest out of all U.S. lotteries.

In July 2022, two people in Illinois split a $1.34 billion Mega Millions jackpot after purchasing a winning ticket at a Speedway gas station and convenience store in Des Plaines, a northwest suburb of Chicago. At the time, it was the third biggest jackpot in U.S. history.

The biggest U.S. jackpot ever was a Powerball prize won in California in November 2022, with a record payout worth a whopping $2.04 billion.

Mega Millions is played in 45 states, as well as Washington, D.C. and the U.S. Virgin Islands.

State-run lotteries brought in roughly $95 billion in revenue in 2021, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Of that, about $64 billion was paid out in prizes and another $3.4 billion was used to run the programs. A little under $27 billion in revenue was left for states to pad their budgets. State lotteries spend more than a half-billion dollars a year on pervasive marketing campaigns designed to persuade people to play often, spend more and overlook the long odds of winning. For every $1 spent on advertising nationwide, lotteries have made about $128 in ticket sales, according to an analysis of lottery data by the Howard Center for Investigative Journalism at the University of Maryland.

Originally Published: Jul 26, 2023 at 1:47 pm