Mega Millions Jackpot Starts Another Slow Climb, Next Drawing Worth $20 Million
The Mega Millions jackpot, for the second time in a week, started what players hope will be a steady climb upward after Friday night’s drawing produced no winner of the minimum $15 million top prize. That sends the jackpot up slightly, to $20 million for Tuesday’s numbers.
Jackpot Fatigue Setting In
Sales of Mega Millions tickets declined for the second week in a row, though only slightly. 17,487,595 were sold nationwide, compared to 17,514,837 for the previous $20 million jackpot last Tuesday, which produced one winner.
An onslaught of staggering nine-figure jackpots over the past year in both Mega Millions and the national Powerball lottery game appear to have produced a kind of “jackpot fatigue,” in which players just don’t feel motivated to test the game’s long odds unless the payoff is truly astronomical.
California Second-Prize Winner To Collect Less That $345,000
Of the tickets sold for Friday’s Mega Millions drawing, only one matched all five regular numbers, while missing the Mega Ball. That ticket was sold in the Los Angeles suburb of Burbank, at Burbank Deli and Market, 1414 West Alameda Boulevard.
In the other 42 states that play Mega Millions, that ticket would have paid out $1 million. But in California which alone uses a pari-mutuel payout system for non-jackpot winnings, whoever bought the million-dollar ticket will collect a relatively slight $344,779 payment instead, according to calculations by the lottery-watchers at USA Mega.
All told, Friday’s Mega Millions drawing generated 1,188,098 winning tickets, though of course, most of the winners are good for prizes as small as a single dollar, the reward for matching just the Mega Ball and nothing else. In fact, of that nearly 1.2 million winning ticket total, 790,593, about two-thirds, were one-dollar winners — basically, a free play in the next Mega Millions drawing.
Check Your Ticket Against The Winning Numbers
But yours might be one of them. Check your ticket against these numbers, drawn at 10:59 pm Friday night in Atlanta, Georgia:
2 — 3 — 9 — 50 — 73 Mega Ball 12
For all those disappointed by last night’s Mega Millions drawing, or waiting for a bigger jackpot, there’s always Saturday’s Powerball lottery. The jackpot in that game stands at $50 million.
